Jakob Frohschammer

In 1861 appeared Über die Aufgabe der Naturphilosophie und ihr Verhältnis zu 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 Über 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 Catholic in literature and philosophy.

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.

When, however, Döllinger 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.

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.