The modern view of man and his freedom has shaped itself gradually in recent times; the present is ever the child of the past. The most important factor in this development was undoubtedly the Reformation. It emancipated man in the most important affair, religious life, from the authority of the Church, and made him independent. “All have the right to try and to judge what is right and wrong in belief,” so Luther told the Christian nobility of the German nation; “everybody shall according to his believing mind interpret the Scriptures, it is the duty of every believing Christian to espouse the faith, to understand and defend it, and to condemn all errors.” Protestantism means even to the modern man “the thinking [pg 028] mind's break with authority, a protest against being fettered by anything positive, the mind's return to itself from self-alienation” (Schwegler, Geschichte der Philosophie (1887), 167): “it puts out of joint the Christian Church organization, and overturns its supernatural foundation, quite against its will, but with an actual, and ever more plainly visible, effect” (E. Troeltsch, Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus fuer die Entstehung der modernen Welt (1906), 29).
The first step towards full autonomy was taken with energy; the emancipation from external authority then progressed rapidly in the domain of politics, sociology, economy, and especially of religion, to the very elimination of everything supernatural. There came the English individualism of the seventeenth century. The liberty of “individual conviction,” termed also “tolerance,” in the sense of rejecting every authoritative interference in the sanctuary of man's thought and feeling, was extolled; of course at first only as the privilege of those who were intellectually superior. Soon the Deism of a Herbert of Cherbury and Locke was reached; it was the religion of natural reason, with belief in God and the obligation to moral action. Whatever is added by positive religions, and therefore by the Christian religion, is superfluous; hence not dogma, but freedom! Locke, indeed, denied to atheists state toleration; but J. Toland already advised full freedom of thought, even to the tolerance of atheism. In the year 1717 Freemasonry came into existence in England. Adam Smith originated the idea of a liberal political economy which frees the individual from all bond, even in the economic field. The views prevailing in England then exert great influence in France. Rousseau and Voltaire appear.
In France and Germany the enlightenment of the eighteenth century makes rapid strides in the direction of emancipation. “The enlightenment of the eighteenth century,” writes H. Heltner, “not only resumes the prematurely interrupted work of the sixteenth century, the Reformation, but carries it on independently, and in its own way. The thoughts and demands of the ‘enlightened’ are bolder and more aggressive, more unscrupulous and daring.... With Luther the idea of revelation remained [pg 029] intact; the new method of thought rejects the idea of a divine revelation, and bases all religious knowledge on merely human thought and sentiment.... It is only the free, entirely independent thought that decides in truth and justice, moral and political rights and duties. Reason has regained its self-glory; man comes to his senses again” (Literaturgeschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts II (1894), 553). Kant gave it a philosophical setting.
Then the French Revolution breaks into fierce blaze, writing on the skies of Europe with flaming letters the ideas of emancipated humanity; the adherents to the old religion are sent to the guillotine. On August 27, 1789, the proclamation of the “rights of man” is made. “The principles of 1789,” as they are now called, henceforth dominate the nineteenth century. The system which adopted these principles called itself, and still calls itself, Liberalism.
Liberalism as a principle—we are speaking of the principles of liberalism, not of its adherents, who for the most part do not carry out these principles in their consequences, and occasionally do not even grasp them completely—tried to accomplish man's utter emancipation from all external and superior authority. It sought to accomplish this in the political field, by instituting constitutional, and, wherever possible, a republican form of government; in the field of economy, by granting freedom to labour and possession, to capital and commerce; but especially in the field of morals and religion, by emancipating thought and science, and the entire life of man,—school, marriage, state,—from every religious influence and direction, and in this sense it aimed at humanizing the whole life of man. This is its purpose. To achieve this, it aims at establishing itself in the state, by gaining political power through the aid of compulsory laws, of course against all principles of freedom; it tries to attain this by compulsory state-education, by obligatory civil marriage, and so on. At first there appeared only a moderate liberalism, which gradually gave place to a more radical tendency, striving more directly and openly toward the enfeeblement and, if possible, the destruction of the Christian view of the world and its chief representative, [pg 030] the Church. In 1848 the well-known materialist K. Vogt said at the national assembly in Frankfort: “Every church is opposed to a free development of mankind, in that it demands faith above all. Every church is an obstacle in the way of man's free intellectual development, and since I am for such intellectual development of man, I am against every church” (cf. Rothenbuecher, Trennung von Staat und Kirche (1908), 106).
In the field of economics, every one can see how liberalism has failed. In some countries people were ashamed to retain its name any longer. It suddenly disappeared from public life, and gave place to its translation,—free thought. This shows that nobody cares to boast of its success. All barriers of safety had been removed in a night; crises, confusion, and the serious danger of the social question were the consequence. In the field of actual economics it became clear that the principle of unlimited freedom could not be carried out, because it was utterly ruinous, and it really means a complete misunderstanding of human nature. Therefore liberalism has disappeared from this field, leaving to others to solve the problem it created, and to heal the wounds it inflicted. It is otherwise in the field of theoretical economics. Here it still strives to dominate, often more thoroughly than before, no matter what name it may assume. The consequences do not appear so gross to the eyes as they would in the tangible sphere of sociology. Especially science it wants to hold in subjection to its principles of freedom in undiminished severity.
That freedom which is identified with absolute independence from all authority, especially in the intellectual sphere, we shall here know as Liberal freedom, in contradistinction to Christian freedom, which is satisfied with independence from unjust restraint.
In the foregoing discussion it has been shown how deeply the liberal idea of freedom is imbedded in the unchristian philosophical view of the world. The inevitable result is a freedom of science which considers every authoritative interference in research and teaching as an encroachment upon the rights of free development in man's personality, especially in the sphere of philosophy and religion. Moreover, the humanitarian view [pg 031] of the world, insisting on the independence of man and his earthly life, naturally demands the exclusion of God and the other world, it orders the rejection of “dualism” as unscientific, and the adoption of the monistic view in its stead; an autonomous science can hardly be reconciled with a superior, restricting authority. Later on we shall demonstrate that the main law of modern science is that the supernatural is inadmissible. Furthermore, since science is not a superhuman being, but has its seat in the intellect of man, subject to the psychology of man, every one who knows the heart of man will suspect from the outset that man cannot stop at merely ignoring, but will often proceed to combat and explain away faith, the Church, and all authority that might be considered an oppressor of the truth. This undue love of liberty will of itself become a struggle for freedom against the oppressor. How far this is actually the case we shall have occasion to discuss later on.
We have heard Nietzsche's haughty and proud boast. Shortly after the philosopher had penned these words he was stricken (1889) with permanent, incurable insanity, with which he was afflicted till his death in 1900. The “transcendental man” was dethroned. The strength of the Titan was shattered. He that said with Prometheus, I am not a god, still I am in strength the equal of any of them, received the ironical answer, “Behold he has become as one of us” (Gen. iii. 22). He that cursed Christian charity towards the poor and suffering, was now cast helpless upon charity. His grave at Roecken, the place also of his birth, is a sign