JACOBI, FRIEDRICH HEINRICH, was born at Düsseldorf, 25th January 1743. At the age of sixteen he was sent to Geneva, where he completed his apprenticeship for the commercial career to which he was destined. Returning to Düsseldorf in 1763, he was, much against his will, placed by his father at the head of a commercial establishment. In that year also he married. In 1770 his elevation to the office of Councillor of Finance for the cities of Berg and Juliers afforded the opportunity, which he ardently desired, of exchanging commercial for literary pursuits. Soon after this he engaged, along with Wieland, in the publication of the German Mercury. In 1776 he was called to Munich to occupy a still more important political position. His honourable and successful defence of the freedom of commerce having brought him into disgrace with the government, he retired to the mansion of Pempelfort, near his native city, where he continued to enjoy a learned leisure till 1793, when the tide of French invasion compelled him to seek refuge in Holstein. The next ten years of his life were passed in the N. of Germany, in voluntary exile. In 1804 he was again called to Munich, as member of an Academy of Sciences about to be instituted; of which, in 1809, he was made president. In his sixty-sixth year he
resigned his functions, and spent the evening of his life in tranquil retirement. His last labour was the revision of his own works. He died before this was completed, on the 10th of March 1819, in the seventy-sixth year of his age.
The character of Jacobi was elevated and noble. When still a youth at Geneva, he exposed himself to ridicule by a disdainful rejection of the tricks and artifices of business; and throughout his career he preserved a stainless purity of life and exaltation of sentiment amounting to philosophical heroism. The foundation of this character was a profound piety, tinged, however, with mysticism. In his literary works the beauty of a great, profound, and harmoniously developed mind, shines forth with a lustre that has attracted universal admiration. It was the man himself that impressed upon his compositions those characters of ardour, profundity, and elegance, which have gained for him the name of the German Plato.
It is worthy of remark in relation to his philosophy generally, that while he was, with the exception of Kant, the most original thinker of his generation, his opinions were from first to last elicited not by solitary meditation, but rather by contact and conflict with other minds. His first impulse towards philosophy was received from his friend Lesage, at Geneva, and was sustained through life by extensive personal intercourse and correspondence with the most celebrated philosophers of his time. His principal works were in their origin polemical. The earliest of them,—the two philosophical romances, Waldemar, and The Correspondence of Alceste (1779–1781),—are directed against the prevailing sensationalism and gross materialistic utilitarianism of the French philosophers. The first of his purely philosophical works,—Letters to Mendelssohn on the Philosophy of Spinoza (1785), occasioned by a conversation with Lessing,—is a destructive criticism of materialistic pantheism. This completes the first period of his literary life. The second period is the epoch of his polemic against the idealism of Kant and Fichte. The principal works belonging to it are,—David Hume, or, Idealism and Realism (1787); a Letter to Fichte (1799); and an examination of The Attempt of the Critical Philosophy to make Reason Intelligible (1801). The last work of Jacobi (the great work of his old age),—On Things Divine, and the Revelation of Them,—is primarily directed against the idealistic pantheism of Schelling.
From the position of continued antagonism and protest which he occupied throughout his literary career, the philosophy of Jacobi presents, in the first instance, a negative, polemical aspect. As directed against Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, the leading principle of his criticism is the assertion that a speculative philosophy, when fully developed, must necessarily lead to atheism and fatalism. Thus he has shown in his Letters to Mendelssohn, that the Cartesian principle of the coincidence of thought and existence has only found its legitimate development in the materialistic pantheism of Spinoza. And again, in his later writings, he has pointed out the inconsistencies into which Kant fell, by attempting to give a solid basis to our knowledge of the actual, while yet in his speculative philosophy rejecting the data of experience; and he has farther shown how these inconsistencies have been escaped only by the egoism of Fichte, in which self is God and the universe, and by a return to Spinozism in the later idealistic pantheism of Schelling. Against all these he iterated and reiterated the assertion that it is vain to seek the materials of a philosophy in thought itself; that pantheism, with its baleful practical results, is the only consistent end of such a course; that while thought or intellect may elaborate, the elements to be so elaborated must be sought elsewhere.
We are thus brought to the positive aspects of Jacobi's philosophy. In maintaining that intellect itself can furnish no materials for metaphysics, he was frequently brought
face to face with the question, Where, then, are they to be found? In his answer to this question, we find the distinctive feature of his system, the philosophy of feeling, faith, reason. His opinions on this point were formed during the earliest period of his career, and were suggested chiefly by the study of Spinoza, Berkeley, and Hume. His subsequent conflict with Kant and his followers occasioned no addition to the substance of his doctrine, but only served to bring it more distinctly and definitely out, by opposition and contrast. According to Jacobi, the materials of knowledge and philosophy are furnished antecedently, in the order of thought, to every exercise of the intellect. If it were not so, intellect or understanding could have had no domain in which to operate. They are furnished with what is above intellect, and beyond its comprehension. This highest faculty of an intelligence is reason. It is its office to apprehend immediately, without any intervention of the understanding, realities that are brought face to face with it as its objects. The data of this reason, as the basis of all that can be comprehended, are themselves incomprehensible. To attempt to establish their validity by any process of analysis or deduction, is to misapprehend their nature and place. They cannot be so established; they can only be accepted as primitive facts, of their own nature authoritative, and constraining us to unquestioning acceptance of them; and the trust which we thus repose in them, the instinctive feeling of reality, is denominated faith.
Thus, for example, in regard to the external world. It is the universal judgment of mankind that that world exists without us, and independent of us. The speculative philosophy in vain attempts to deduce the knowledge of it from our understanding. The necessary result of such an attempt is either to identify mind with matter, as in Spinoza's materialism, or to identify matter with mind, as in Schelling's idealism. The only legitimate course is to accept the fact of an external world, as immediately revealed to our reason; the only legitimate interpretation of the fact is a system of dualism and realism. Nor is it a valid objection that we are thus constrained to depend upon the mere feeling of the truth, to exercise faith in the reason which brings us into direct contact with the reality. For from the nature of the case such faith must be exercised, whenever we come into contact with a primitive and underived fact of consciousness. And what but the same feeling or faith have we to plead in behalf of the law of the understanding itself, the principle of identity or contradiction?
Again, in recognizing the reality without us, the external not-self, we are at the same time recognizing, in contrast to it, the reality within us—the internal ego or self. It is true that at first the emphasis is laid upon the assertion of the non-ego; but this implies the assertion of the contrasted ego—it is impossible to recognize the one, without at the same time a conscious recognition of the other. And thus, along with the external world, reason also immediately reveals to us the internal. Indeed, it is especially in so doing that reason is the life and soul of the human mind. Our individuality, our personality, our identity, it gives as primitive facts, beyond question and beyond explanation. And in thus enabling us to say "I am," it constitutes the peculiarly divine in man, who in this respect, as distinctly self-conscious, is the image of the Supreme Being, the great "I am" Himself.
And it is here that we find the peculiar and appropriate sphere of reason, in immediate contact with the great realities of the soul—God, liberty, immortality, the true, the beautiful, and the good. In this highest sphere especially, it appears how reason is the life of the mind. It alone can reveal to us the objects which form the food of that life. And it is only in proportion as we are in harmony with these that the revelation can be made.
In this way Jacobi traced back our knowledge to a pri-
Jacobins. mitive revelation, made by reason, faith, feeling, of realities independent of thought. This supreme revealer, from its very nature, is itself mysterious and inexplicable. But that does not imply that we may not seek to construct a system by collecting the data that are thus furnished to humanity, and, using this same reason as a test, purifying them from the various prejudices with which, in the blindness of spontaneous life, they may have been adulterated. Jacobi mainly occupied himself in vindicating the place and authority of this primitive revelation; he has not attempted any complete systematic exposition of its contents. In the words of a reviewer cited by Chalihaeus, "Jacobi is like a solitary thinker, who, at the dawn of day, has found some ancient riddle hewn in an eternal rock. He believes in the riddle, but in vain endeavours to solve it. He carries it about with him the whole day, coaxes out of it some important meaning, coins this into doctrines and images, which delight the hearers and animate them with noble wishes and presentiments; but the solution fails, and he lays himself down to rest at eventide in the hope that some divine dream, or the morrow, will give to his longing the true interpretation in which he has so firmly believed."
Jacobi's influence has been less felt in the formation of a distinct school than in contributing to modify the opinions of the followers of Kant and his successors. In this respect his avowed mysticism was perhaps the best antidote to the reigning rationalism. But both in philosophy and in theology this mysticism, so far as erroneous, is in itself an evil; and in Germany the mysticism of Jacobi has already produced its bitter fruits. So far as the positive elements of his philosophy are concerned, the British student cannot fail to be struck with their coincidence with the leading doctrines of the Scottish school. In his earliest publication, in the person of one of the heroes of the tale, he bases his opposition to empiricism and epicureism upon Ferguson's History of Civil Society, and also expresses ardent admiration of the works of Thomas Reid. His doctrine of the immediate knowledge of the external world is identical with that of Reid; and his doctrine of reason and faith in general, so far as it goes, coincides in the main with the generalizations of Sir William Hamilton.
His whole works have been collected and edited by one of his disciples, with an introduction containing a sketch of his philosophy. This edition was published at Leipzig, 1812-25, in six octavo volumes. (J. M. O.)