t put off the
old Adam, no matter how much an atheology sunk in literalism may comfort
itself with the hope that man can "drink at another's cost" (that the merit
of another is imputed to him).[1]

[Footnote 1: Weigel is discussed by J.O. Opel, Leipsic, 1864.]

German mysticism reaches its culmination in the Goerlitz cobbler, Jacob
Boehme (1575-1624; _Aurora, or the Rising Dawn_; _Mysterium Magnum, or
on the First Book of Moses_, etc. The works of Boehme, collected by his
apostle, Gichtel, appeared in 1682 in ten volumes, and in 1730 in six
volumes; a new edition was prepared by Schiebler in 1831-47, with a second
edition in 1861 _seq_.). Boehme's doctrine[1] centers about the problem of
the origin of evil. He transfers this to God himself and joins therewith
the leading thought of Eckhart, that God goes through a process, that he
proceeds from an unrevealed to a revealed condition. At the sight of a tin
vessel glistening in the sun, he conceived, as by inspiration, the idea
that as the sunlight reveals itself on the dark vessel so all light needs
darkness and all good evil in order to appear and to become knowable.
Everything becomes perceptible through its opposite alone: gentleness
through sternness, love through anger, affirmation through negation.
Without evil there would be no life, no movement, no distinctions, no
revelation; all would be unqualified, uniform nothingness. And as in nature
nothing exists in which good and evil do not reside, so in God, besides
power or the good, a contrary exists, without which he would remain unknown
to himself. The theogonic process is twofold: self-knowledge on the part of
God, and his revelation outward, as eternal nature, in seven moments.

[Footnote 1: Cf. Windelband's fine exposition, _Geschichte der neueren
Philosophie_, vol. i. Sec.19. The following have written on Boehme: Fr. Baader
(in vols. iii. and xiii. of his _Werke_); Hamberger, Munich, 1844: H. A.
Fechner, Goerlitz, 1857; A. v. Harless, Berlin, 1870, new edition, Leipsic,
1882.]

At the beginning of the first development God is will without object,
eternal quietude and rest, unqualified groundlessness without determinate
volition. But in this divine nothingness there soon awakes the hunger after
the aught (somewhat, existence), the impulse to apprehend and manifest
self, and as God looks into and forms an image of himself, he divides into
Father and Son. The Son is the eye with which the Father intuits himself,