About forty years later I met the professor who was now pensioned, and consequently no longer a member of the college of augurs. Then I asked him whether he had ever mastered æsthetics?
"Good gracious, no! That is why I sent you to the lecturer."
"Did he understand them then?"
"I don't think so. But he had a good memory."
Then after all it was not my fault, and I was not more stupid than the rest.
Anyone who reads a short history of philosophy, and observes how one system replaces and refutes another, must be inclined to say, "Surely it is time to make an end of this drivel!" For the whole history of philosophy proves that thought cannot solve these problems, or that they cannot be solved by constructing a system of philosophy. The few philosophers, on the other hand, who have limited themselves to reflections on the variegated medley of life as seen in man, politics, and nature, have been of some use, but they are hardly counted philosophers. One can read fragments of Plato with interest, and also the unappreciated Schopenhauer, especially in his least-valued work Parerga and Paralipomena, but not in his systematic treatise The World as Will and Idea. Kierkegaard is not regarded as a philosopher, nor are Feuerbach and his pupil Nietzsche, but they are extraordinarily instructive. All who construct an empty system with facts are fools. Such is Boström, who tries to subtilise conceptions, analyse ideas, and classify and arrange God, man, and human life under heads.
The history of philosophy is the history of errors, the history of lying, for nearly all philosophers are disguised rebels against God and opponents of religion. Philosophy is a history of falsehood, and since it has demonstrated its own absurdity, all professorships of philosophy should be abolished. For a Christian state frustrates its own aims and is foolish if it supports a teacher of error and falsehood.
If for once in a way a philosopher is religious, people give him the contemptuous name of "mystic," although very few know what mysticism is.
In one professorial chair sits an Hegelian and preaches Hegel's pantheism as the truth, and in another sits a Boströmian and pulls Hegel to pieces. But the student must be examined by both, and give his adherence to both systems together. That is the higher education, academic culture, and learning in its glory!