What is a system? Little attention has been paid to the historical development of the concept of system in order to understand what is meant by the term. Yet work outside of philosophy-- work in experimental embryology, evolutionary developmental biology, developmental psychology, sociological theory, the physical and chemical sciences, etc.-- has converged on a conception of system which first found decisive focus in the German Idealist philosophical tradition. To be sure, the widespread, even casual, use of the term in the 20th and 21st centuries owes a conceptual debt to the German Idealists. Systems were an obsession of the German Idealists (Kant, Fichte, Reinhold, Bardili, Schelling, Hegel). The notion of a fully-formed, perfected system established the epistemological, and even ontological, ideal for philosophical speculation and scientific knowledge ('Wissenschaft') in the latter part of the 18th century and continuing on well into the latter part of the
19the century. For the German Idealists, systems were a question of a particular brand of philosophical inquiry known as speculation. Speculation involved the rigorous tracing back of any philosophical or scientific explanation of phenomena to an absolute foundation (of certainty and coherence) such that the phenomena could be fully justified as irrefutable knowledge. Not high-flown discourses on the nature and proofs of God's existence, but mathematical theorems, stoichiometrical relationships, accounts of the evolutionary genesis of animal forms, all of these species of knowledge stood or fell within a form of speculative, systemic justification. It was the pursuit of the systematic philosophers of the German Idealist tradition to gather a diversity of empirical knowledge and to synthesize it in one master-system, under one philosophical principle holding for all knowledge, in logic, nature, and the human sciences (the sciences of the human 'spirit'). This type of philosophy, system philosophy, reached a peak, but also a strange dead end, in Hegel’s great “scientific” elaboration of system in his magisterial _Science of Logic_ (with editions pubslihed between the years of 1812 and 1832).