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He became a student at Halle, and thence removed to Berlin, where he was
appointed chaplain to the _House of Charity_. While in that metropolis
he had rare opportunities for the study of his times. He saw that the
indifference and doubt which centered in the court and the university,
controlled the leaders of theology, literature, and statesmanship. He
drew his philosophy largely from Jacobi, exhibiting with that thinker
his dissatisfaction at the existing condition of metaphysics and
theology. Schleiermacher could not look upon the dearth around him
without the deepest emotion. He asked himself if there was no remedy
for the wide-spread evil. The seat of the disease appeared to him to be
the false deification of reason in particular; and the general mistake
of making religion dependent upon external bases instead of upon the
heart and consciousness of man. His conclusion was that both the friends
and enemies of Rationalism were mistaken, and that religion consists not
in knowledge but in feeling. It was in 1799 that he wrote his
_Discourses on Religion addressed to its Cultivated Despisers_.
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