Romanticism à la Rousseau: passion ("the sovereign right of passion"); "naturalness"; the fascination of madness (foolishness reckoned as greatness); the senseless vanity of the weak; the revengefulness of the masses elevated to the position of justice ("in politics, for one hundred years, the leader has always been this invalid").
101.
Kant: makes the scepticism of Englishmen, in regard to the theory of knowledge, possible for Germans.
(1) By enlisting in its cause the interest of the German's religious and moral needs: just as the new academicians used scepticism for the same reasons, as a preparation for Platonism (vide Augustine); just as Pascal even used moral scepticism in order to provoke (to justify) the need of belief;
(2) By complicating and entangling it with scholastic flourishes in view of making it more acceptable to the German's scientific taste in form (for Locke and Hume, alone, were too illuminating, too clear—that is to say, judged according to the German valuing instinct, "too superficial").
Kant: a poor psychologist and mediocre judge of human nature, made hopeless mistakes in regard to great historical values (the French Revolution); a moral fanatic à la Rousseau; with a subterranean current of Christian values; a thorough dogmatist, but bored to extinction by this tendency, to the extent of wishing to tyrannise over it, but quickly tired, even of 'scepticism; and not yet affected by any cosmopolitan thought or antique beauty ... a dawdler and a go-between, not at all original (like Leibnitz, something between mechanism and spiritualism; like Goethe, something between the taste of the eighteenth century and that of the "historical sense" [which is essentially a sense of exoticism]; like German music, between French and Italian music; like Charles the Great, who mediated and built bridges between the Roman Empire and Nationalism—a dawdler par excellence).
102.
In what respect have the Christian centuries with their Pessimism been stronger centuries than the eighteenth—and how do they correspond with the tragic age of the Greeks?
The nineteenth century versus the eighteenth. How was it an heir?—how was it a step backwards from the latter? (more lacking in "spirit" and in taste)—how did it show an advance on the latter? (more gloomy, more realistic, stronger).
103.