most of the time, delivering his famous Addresses to the German Nation in
1807 at the Berlin Academy of Sciences to an audience which included Wilhelm
von Humboldt. In 1809 von Humboldt, as minister in the Prussian reform
government, founded the University of Berlin, naming Fichte professor of
philosophy and its first rector in 1810. Schleiermacher simultaneously became
professor of theology, and later succeeded Fichte as rector after the latter’s
death in 1814. Fichte’s chair was filled (after war-related delays) in 1818 by
Hegel. By the 1820s, the Idealist center at Berlin was in the routinized phase
of normal science, and it was here in the 1830s that the Hegel school would
undergo its splits.
As the network and its centers burgeoned and broke apart, intellectual
positions were splitting and realigning as well. As in any successful intellectual
movement, control of the dominant attention space was subject to the law of
small numbers. The victorious side had room for sub-splits upon which rival
careers could be made. The earliest manifestation was the rupture between the
Kantians and Fichte’s Idealism. By 1799 Kant had repudiated Fichte’s doc-
trines. Idealism now was the crest of the surging wave, the center of attention
and emotional enthusiasm, and the older anti-Kantian opposition began to
rally behind Kant himself as a more modest defense against Idealist extremes.
The main Idealist opposition now interpreted Kantian categories as facts of
human psychology rather than as transcendental. Following this path, Bouter-
wek (1799, 1806) produced a psychologistic compromise between the out-and-
out Idealists and scientific materialists. Fries (1803) tied Kantian doctrine to
the exact sciences; Herbart, the most important later opponent of the Idealists,
pioneered empirical research in psychology.
This opposition acquired its own centers. Göttingen had been the leading
center of academic scholarship since the 1770s, especially historical philology
and mathematics. Now it housed anti-Idealists: Lichtenberg, a mathematics
professor who satirized Sturm und Drang sentimentalism, as well as Schulze,
Bouterwek, and Herbart. The pre-Jena center became anti-Jena and later
anti-Berlin. The most eminent in exploiting the anti-Idealist space was Herbart,
a former Jena student of the early 1790s, who found a distinctive space from
1802 on in refusing to go along with the Idealist tide. As the Idealists split
from the Kantians, Königsberg became another oppositional center.
The old battle lines of rationalists versus sentimentalists were now almost
completely eclipsed. The Idealists, led by Fichte, had become religious radicals.
Whereas Kant reduced religion to ethical practice, Fichte, whose philosophy
made the entire world into a phenomenon of spirit, verged on promoting an
entirely new religion, blending humanitarian political reform with universal
spiritual enlightenment. This position was assailed by orthodox Christians,
while the middle ground was seized by the theologian Schleiermacher, whose632 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths