Their abhorrence of Kant, though less openly expressed, is scarcely less great than their hatred of me; precisely because all speculative Theology and all Rational Psychology—the bread-winners of these gentlemen—have been undermined, not to say irrevocably ruined, by him in the eyes of all serious thinkers. What! Not hate him? him, who has made their "trade in philosophy" so difficult to them, that they hardly see how to pull through honourably! So Kant and I are accordingly both bad, and these gentlemen quite overlook us. For nearly forty years they have not deigned to cast a glance upon me, and now they look down condescendingly upon Kant from the heights of their wisdom, smiling in pity at his errors. This policy is both very wise and very profitable; since they are thus able to hold forth at their ease volume after volume upon God and the soul, as if these were personalities with whom they were intimately acquainted, and to discourse upon the relation in which the former stands to the world and the latter to the body, just as if there had never been such a thing as a Critique of Pure Reason. When once the Critique of Pure Reason is done away with, all will go on splendidly! Now it is for this end that they have been endeavouring for many years quietly and gradually to set Kant aside, to make him obsolete, nay, to turn up their noses at him, and one being encouraged by the other in this, they are becoming bolder every day.[171] They have no opposition to fear from their own colleagues, since they all have the same aims and the same mission and all together form a numerous coterie, the brilliant members of which, coram populo, bow and scrape to each other on all sides. Thus by degrees things have come to such a point, that the wretchedest compilers of manuals have the presumption to treat Kant's grand, immortal discoveries as antiquated errors, nay, calmly to set them aside with the most ludicrous arrogance and most impudent dicta of their own, which they nevertheless lay down under the disguise of argumentation, because they know they may count upon a credulous public, to whom Kant's writings are not known.[172] And this is what happens to Kant on the part of writers, whose total incapacity strikes us in every page, not to say every line, we read of their unmeaning, stupefying verbiage! Were this to go on much longer, Kant would present the spectacle of the dead lion being kicked by the donkey. Even in France there is no lack of fellow-workers inspired by a similar orthodoxy, who are labouring towards the same end. A certain M. Barthélemy de St. Hilaire, for instance, in a lecture delivered in the Académie des Sciences Morales in April, 1850, has presumed to criticize Kant with an air of condescension and to use most improper language in speaking of him; luckily however in such a way, that no one could fail to see the underlying purpose.[173]
Now others among our German "traders in philosophy" again try to get rid of the obnoxious Kant in a different way: instead of attacking his philosophy point-blank, they rather seek to undermine the foundations on which it is built. These people however are so utterly forsaken by all the gods and by all power of judgment, that they attack à priori truths: that is to say, truths as old as the human understanding, nay, which constitute that understanding itself, and which it is therefore impossible to contradict without declaring war against that understanding also. So great however is the courage of these gentlemen. I am sorry to say I know of three,[174] and I am afraid there are a good many more at work at this undermining process, who have the incredible presumption to maintain the à posteriori origin of Space as a consequence, a mere relation, of the objects within it; for they assert that Space and Time are of empirical origin and attached to those bodies, so that [according to them] Space first arises through our perception of the juxtaposition of bodies and Time likewise through our perception of the succession of changes (sancta simplicitas! as if the words "collateral" and "successive" would have any sense for us without the antecedent intuitions of Space and of Time to give them a meaning); consequently, that if there were no bodies, there would be no Space, therefore if they disappeared Space also must lapse, and that if all changes were to stop, Time also would stop.[175]
And such stuff as this is gravely taught fifty years after Kant's death! The aim of it is, as we know, to undermine Kantian philosophy, and certainly if these propositions were true, one stroke would suffice to overthrow it. Fortunately however these assertions are of a kind which is met by derision rather than by serious refutation. For, in them, the question is one of heresy, not so much against Kantian philosophy, as against common sense; and they are not so much an attack upon any particular philosophical dogma, as upon an à priori truth which, as such, constitutes human understanding itself, and therefore must be instantaneously evident to every one who is in his senses, just as much as that 2 × 2 = 4. Fetch me a peasant from the plough; make the question intelligible to him; and he will tell you, that even if all things in Heaven and on Earth were to vanish, Space would nevertheless remain, and that if all changes in Heaven and on Earth were to cease, Time would nevertheless flow on. Compared with German pseudo-philosophers like these, how estimable does a man like the French physicist Pouillet appear, who, though he never troubles his head about Metaphysics, is careful to incorporate two long paragraphs, one on l'Espace, the other on le Temps, in the first chapter of his well-known Manual, on which public instruction in France is based, where he shows that if all Matter were annihilated, Space would still remain, and that Space is infinite; and that if all changes ceased, Time would still pursue its course without end. Now here he does not appeal, as in all other cases, to experience, because in this case experience is not possible; yet he speaks with apodeictic certainty. For, as a physicist, professing a science which is absolutely immanent—i.e. limited to the reality that is empirically given—it never comes into his head to inquire whence he knows all this. It did come into Kant's head, and it was this very problem, clothed by him in the severe form of an inquiry as to the possibility of synthetical à priori judgments, that became the starting-point and the corner-stone of his immortal discoveries, or in other words, of Transcendental Philosophy which, precisely by answering this question and others related to it, shows what is the nature of that empirical reality itself.[176]
And seventy years after the Critique of Pure Reason had appeared and filled the world with its fame, these gentlemen dare to serve up such gross absurdities, which were done away with long ago, and to return to former barbarism. If Kant were to come back and see all this mischief, he would feel like Moses on returning from Mount Sinai, when he found his people worshipping the golden calf, and dashed the Tables to pieces in his anger. But if Kant were to take things as tragically as Moses, I should console him with the words of Jesus Sirach:[177] "He that telleth a tale to a fool speaketh to one in a slumber; when he hath told his tale, he will say, 'What is the matter?'" For that diamond in Kant's crown, Transcendental Æsthetic, never has existed for these gentlemen—it is tacitly set aside, as non-avenue. I wonder what they think Nature means by producing the rarest of all her works, a great mind, one among so many hundreds of millions, if the worshipful company of numskulls are to be able at their pleasure and by their mere counter-assertion to annul the weightiest doctrines emanating from that mind, let alone to treat them with disregard and do as if they did not exist.
But this degenerate, barbarous state of philosophy which, in the present day, emboldens every tyro to hold forth at random upon subjects that have puzzled the greatest minds, is precisely a consequence still remaining of the impunity with which—thanks to the connivance of our professors of philosophy—that audacious scribbler, Hegel, has been allowed to flood the market with his monstrous vagaries and so to pass for the greatest of all philosophers for the last thirty years in Germany. Every one of course now thinks himself entitled to serve up confidently anything that may happen to come into his sparrow's brain.
Therefore, as I have said, the gentlemen of the 'philosophical trade' are anxious before all things to obliterate Kant's philosophy, in order to be able to return to the muddy canal of the old dogmatism and to talk at random to their heart's content upon the favourite subjects which are specially recommended to them: just as if nothing had happened and neither a Kant nor a Critical Philosophy had ever come into the world.[178] The affected veneration for, and laudation of, Leibnitz too, which has been showing itself everywhere for some years, proceed from the same source. They like to place him in a line with, nay above, Kant, having at times the assurance to call him the greatest of all German philosophers. Now, compared with Kant, Leibnitz is a poor rushlight. Kant is a master-mind, to whom mankind is indebted for the discovery of never-to-be-forgotten truths. One of his chief merits is precisely, to have delivered us from Leibnitz and his subtleties: from pre-established harmonies, monads and identitas indiscernibilium. Kant has made philosophy serious and I am keeping it so. That these gentlemen should think differently is easily explained; for has not Leibnitz a central Monad and a Theodicée also, with which to deck it out? Now this is quite to the taste of my gentlemen 'of the philosophical trade.' It does not stand in the way of earning a honest livelihood; it allows one to subsist; whereas such a thing as Kant's "Critique of all Speculative Theology," makes one's hair stand on end. Kant is consequently a wrong-headed man and one to be set aside. Vivat Leibnitz! Vivat the 'philosophical trade!' Vivat old woman's philosophy! These gentlemen really imagine that, according to the standard of their own petty aims, they can obscure what is good, disparage what is great, and accredit what is false. They may perhaps succeed in doing so for a time, but certainly not in the long run, nor with impunity. Notwithstanding all their machinations and spiteful ignoring of me for forty years, have not even I at last made my way? During those forty years however I have learnt to appreciate Chamfort's words: "En examinant la ligue des sots contre les gens d'esprit, on croirait voir une conspiration de valets pour écarter les maîtres."
We do not care to have much to do with those whom we dislike. One of the consequences of this antipathy for Kant, therefore, has been an incredible ignorance of his doctrines. I can scarcely believe my eyes at times, when I see certain proofs of this ignorance, and must here support my assertion by a few examples. First let me present a very singular specimen, though it is now some years old. In Professor Michelet's "Anthropology and Psychology" (p. 444), he states Kant's Categorical Imperative in the following words: "thou must, for thou canst" (du sollst, denn du kannst). This cannot be a lapsus calami, for he again states it in the same words in his "History of the Development of Modern German Philosophy" (p. 38),[179] published three years later. Letting alone the fact that he appears to have studied Kantian philosophy in Schiller's epigrams, he has thus turned the thing upside down, and expressed exactly the opposite of Kant's argument; evidently without having the slightest inkling of what Kant meant by that postulate of Freedom on the basis of his Categorical Imperative. None of Professor Michelet's colleagues, to my knowledge, have pointed out this mistake, but "hanc veniam damus, petimusque vicissim."—Another more recent instance. The above mentioned reviewer of Oersted's book (see [note 1] (c), p. 202), to whose title the present treatise unfortunately had to stand godfather, comes in that work on the sentence that "bodies are spaces filled with force" (krafterfüllte Räume). This is new to him; so without the faintest suspicion that he has to do with a far-famed Kantian dogma, and taking this for a paradoxical opinion of Oersted's, he attacks it and argues against it bravely, persistently and repeatedly in both his reviews, which appeared at an interval of three years from one another, using arguments like these: "Force cannot fill Space without something substantial, Matter;" then again three years later: "Force in Space does not yet constitute any thing. For Force to fill Space, there must be Substance, Matter. A mere force can never fill. Matter must be there for it to fill."—Bravo! my cobbler would use just such arguments as these.[180]—When I see specimina eruditionis of this sort, I begin to have my misgivings whether I did not do the man injustice by naming him among those who endeavour to undermine Kant; but in this, to be sure, I had in view his assertions that "Space is but the relation, the juxtaposition of things,"[181] and that "Space is a relation in which things stand, a juxtaposition of things. This juxtaposition ceases to be a conception as soon as the conception of Matter ceases."[182] For he might possibly have penned these sentences in sheer innocence, since he may have known no more of the "Transcendental Æsthetic" than of the "Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science;" though to be sure, this would be rather extraordinary for a professor of philosophy. Now-a-days however we must not be surprised at anything. For all knowledge of Critical Philosophy has died out, in spite of its being the latest true philosophy that has appeared, and a doctrine withal, that has made a revolution and epoch in human knowledge and thought. Now therefore, since it has overthrown all previous systems, and since the knowledge of it has died out, philosophising no longer proceeds on the basis of any of the doctrines propounded by the great minds of the past, but becomes a mere random untutored process, having an ordinary education and the catechism for its foundation. Now that I have startled them however, our professors may perhaps take to studying Kant's works again. Still Lichtenberg says: "Past a certain age, I think it as impossible to learn Kantian Philosophy as to learn rope-dancing."
I should certainly not have condescended to record the sins of these sinners had not the interests of truth required that I should do so, in order to show the state of degradation at which German Philosophy has arrived fifty years after Kant's death in consequence of the machinations of the gentlemen 'of the trade,' and also to show what would result, if these puny minds, who know nothing but their own ends, were to be suffered without hindrance to check the influence of the great geniuses who have illumined the world. I cannot look on at this in silence; it is rather a case to which Göthe's exhortation applies:
"Du Kräftiger, sei nicht so still,
Wenn auch sich Andre scheuen: