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Jakob Frohschammer

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JAKOB FROHSCHAMMER (1821-1893), German theologian and philosopher, was born at Illkofen, near Regensburg, on the 6th of January 1821. Destined by his parents for the Roman Catholic priesthood, he studied theology at Munich, but felt an ever-growing attraction to philosophy. Nevertheless, after much hesitation, he took what he himself calls the most mistaken step of his life, and in 1847 entered the priesthood. His keenly logical intellect, and his impatience of authority where it clashed with his own convictions, quite unfitted him for that unquestioning obedience which the Church demanded. It was only after open defiance of the bishop of Regensburg that he obtained permission to continue his studies at Munich. He at first devoted himself more especially to the study of the history of dogma, and in 1850 published his Beitrage zur Kirchengeschichte, which was placed on the Index ,Expurgatorius. But he felt that his real vocation was philosophy, and after holding for a short time an extraordinary professorship of theology, he became professor of philosophy in 1855. This appointment he owed chiefly to his work, Ober den Ursprung der menschlichen Seelen (1854), in which he maintained that the human soul was not implanted by a special creative act in each case, but was the result of a secondary creative act on the part of the parents: that soul as well as body, therefore, was subject to the laws of heredity. This was supplemented in r8 55 by the controversial Menschenseele and Physiologie. Undeterred by the offence which these works gave to his ecclesiastical superiors, he published in 1858 the Einleitung in die Philosophie and Grundriss der Metaphysik, in which he assailed the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas, that philosophy was the handmaid of theology. In 1861 appeared Ober die Aufgabe der Naturphilosophie and ihr Verhdltnis zur Naturwissenschaft, which was, he declared, directed against the purely mechanical conception of the universe, and affirmed the necessity of a creative Power. In the same year he published Ober die Freiheit der Wissenschaft, in which he maintained the independence of science, whose goal was truth, against authority, and reproached the excessive respect for the latter in the Roman Church with the insignificant part played by the German Catholics in literature and philosophy. He was denounced by the pope himself in an apostolic brief of the rlth of December 1862, and students of theology were forbidden to attend his lectures.

Public opinion was now keenly excited; he received an ovation from the Munich students, and the king, to whom he owed his appointment, supported him warmly. A conference of Catholic savants, held in 1863 under the presidency of Dellinger, decided that authority must be supreme in the Church. When, however, Dbllinger and his school in their turn started the Old Catholic movement, Frohschammer refused to associate himself with their cause, holding that they did not go far enough, and that their declaration of 1863 had cut the ground from under their feet. Meanwhile he had, in 1862, founded the Atheneium as the organ of Liberal Catholicism. For this he wrote the first adequate account in German of the Darwinian theory of natural selection, which drew a warm letter of appreciation from Darwin himself. Excommunicated in 1871, he replied with three articles, which were reproduced in thousands as pamphlets in the chief European languages: Der Fels Petri in Rom (1873), Der Primal Petri and des Papstes (1875), and Das Christenthum Christi and das Christenthum des Papstes (1876). In Das neue Wissen and der neue Glaube (1873) he showed himself as vigorous an opponent of the materialism of Strauss as of the doctrine of papal infallibility. His later years were occupied with a series of philosophical works, of which the most important were: Die Phantasie als Grundprincip des Weltprocesses (1877), Uber die Genesis der Menschheit and deren geistige Entwicklung in Religion, Sittlichkeit and Sprache (1883), and Ober die Organisation and Cultur der menschlichen Gesellschaft (1885). His system is based on the unifying principle of imagination ( Phantasie ), which he extends to the objective creative force of Nature, as well as to the subjective mental phenomena to which the term is usually confined. He died at Bad Kreuth in the Bavarian Highlands on the 14th of June 1893.

In addition to other treatises on theological subjects, Frohschammer was also the author of Monaden and Weltphantasie and Ober die Bedeutung der Einbildungskraft in der Philosophic Kants and Spinozas (1879); Uber die Principien der Aristotelischen Philosophic and die Bedeutung der Phantasie in derselben (1881); Die Philosophic als Idealwissenschaft and System (1884); Die Philosophic des Thomas von Aquino kritisch gewiirdigt (1889); Ober das Mysterium Magnum des Daseins (1891); System der Philosophic im Umriss, pt. i. (1892). His autobiography was published in A. Hinrichsen's Deutsche Denker (r888). See also F. Kirchner, Uber das Grundprincip des Weltprocesses (1882), with special reference to F.; E. Reich, Weltanschauung and Menschenleben; Betrachtungen fiber die Philosophic J. Frohschammers (1894); B. Manz, J. Frohschammer, der Philosoph der Weltphantasie (1894) and Briefe von and fiber J. Frohschammer (1897); J. Friedrich, Jakob Frohschammer (1896) and Systematische and kritische Darstellung der Psychologie J. Frohschammers (1899); A. Attensperger, J. Frohschammers philosophisches System im Grundriss (1899).