THE impulse to make open confession, to reveal
the counsels of the heart, or to write spiritual
autobiography seems particularly strong in religious
souls, and has in all times and places left an intimate
record of religious experience. Schleiermacher
Soliloquies (Monologen) is a record of this type,
although it contains nothing, as its author says, of
religion in a strict and narrow sense. ¹ It is an inner
conversation, a series of meditations, a book of self-
scrutiny. It is one of the very few writings in the
literature of German philosophic idealism, which im-
parts experiences and beliefs directly instead of
through a medium of speculation and dialectic. It
supplements the argued apology for religion, with
which Schleiermacher's name is pre-eminently associ-
ated, by a more immediate revelation of his own dis-
tinctive spirituality. There is no more immediate and
representative a revelation than the Soliloquies of
that peculiar speculative and romantic idealism which
has so thoroughly permeated German thought from
1800 to the very present. The chief fruits of Schleier-
macher's life are no doubt to be found in his works
on religion, especially in his noted book On Religion:
Speeches addressed to its cultured despisers ( 1799),
but what his life was in its spiritual essence, when he

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