Abstract

C. G. Carus was the last and perhaps—besides G. H. Schubert—the most important representative of late Romantic philosophical anthropology. The present book is a welcome reprint of his most popular writing, a fascinating, imaginative, more speculative than experimental treatise on the different psychic functions. Carus' main thesis—avowedly inspired by the Schellingian Naturphilosophie—is the living unity of the body and the soul, which is itself, however, only a superior manifestation of a life-penetrated Universe. Like the other Romantic "scientists" gravitating around Schelling, Carus was entirely forgotten during the second half of the nineteenth century; but he is now being read again.—M. J. V.