Philosophy.—Some critical philosophers have now borrowed from the algebra a mathematical method, without which one cannot for a single minute—not so much think as—write philosophically. The algebraist, by the transposition of mere letters, catches truths which no chain of reasoning could ever draw out of the deep. In this the critical philosopher has imitated him, but with greater advantage. As he cleverly mixes together, not letters, but whole technical words, there rises from the alliteration of the same a cream of truths which he could hardly have dreamed of. Such philosophers are forbidden, and rightly, like the preachers of Gotha (Goth. Public Ordinances, P. III. p. 16), to use allegories, or any flower of speech, which, as other flowers do for the drawing-hounds, would spoil the scent.—Properly, however, the picturesque style is more definite than the technical word-style, which finally, as all abstract words are pictures, is also itself a picturesque style, only one full of pictures that have run out and faded. Jacobi is not obscure in consequence of his images, but in consequence of the new ideas which through them he would communicate to us.
I have lately been looking over the birth-lists of the learned and teaching republic, and counting up the young little Kants whom the old Kant—otherwise unmarried, like his cousin Newton—has for the last ten Fairs begotten. Demetrius Magnus, who wanted to make a book of authors of the same name, must have been very stupid, if he had undertaken to write in our times, and yet at the same time, though he nevertheless communicated that there had been sixteen Platos, twenty Socrateses, twenty-eight Pythagorases, thirty-two Aristotles, had very sinfully omitted to say that there are now as many philosophers and philosophists as those make when reckoned all together—namely, ninety-six—who could bear the name of Kant,—that is, if they chose to. Such mechanics—thus may I call the magisters, because formerly the mechanics, inversely, were called magisters, and the upper master arch-magister—one should take into account as the best propaganda which bulky books can have. They are, at best, competent to diffuse the system, because they know how to separate from it the incomprehensible, the spiritual, and to extract what is popular and palpable, i. e. the words for readers, who, otherwise simple, nevertheless would not die without a critical philosophy. The most miserable theological and æsthetic stone receives now a Kantian setting in words. Although every new system introduces a certain one-sidedness of view into all heads,—especially as every cold philosopher has so much the more one-sidedness, precisely as he has the more insight,—still that is no matter; for great bars of truth come forth through the joint digging of the whole thinking-works.[[234]] Whoever has seen Kant standing on his mountain among his learned fellow-laborers, is reminded with pleasure of a similar incident in Peru, which Buffon communicates. When Condamine and Bouger were measuring there the equatorial degrees of the earth (as Kant did of the intellectual world), whole troops of apes appeared as coadjutors, put on spectacles, looked at the stars and down at the clocks, and reduced one thing and another to writing, although without salary, which is their only distinction from the vicariate Kants.
Every man of genius is a philosopher, but not the reverse. A philosopher without fancy, without history, and without a general knowledge of the most important things, is more one-sided than a politician. Whoever has adopted, rather than discovered, a system; whoever has not had beforehand dark presentiments thereof; whoever has not at least pined for it beforehand; in short, whoever does not bring with him a soul like a full, warm, ground filled with germs, which waits only for its summer,—such a one may indeed be a teacher, but not a scholar of the philosophy which he degrades to a mercenary profession; and, briefly, it is all one what place one climbs as his philosophical observatory,—a throne, or a Pegasus, or an Alp, or a Cæsar's-couch, or a bier,—and they are almost all higher than the desk in a lecture-room and hall of disputation.
Q (see K).
R.
Reviewers.—An editor of a review should have six tables. At the first should sit and eat the advertisers of the existence of a book; at the second, the wholesale appraisers of its value; at the third, the epitomists of it; at the fourth, the grammarians and philologists, who distribute to the public catalogues raisonnés of other men's grammatical blunders; at the fifth, the fighters, who refute a new book, not by a new book, but by a sheet; at the sixth should stand the critical, princely bench, on which might sit Herder, Goethe, Wieland, and perhaps yet another, who survey a book as a human life, who apprehend its individuality, indicate at once the spirit of the literary creation and creator, and separate that incarnation and embodiment of the divine beauty which takes the form of an individual from the beauty, and then disclose and pardon it.
These six critical benches, which might edit six different literary periodicals, are now thrown over each other, and form one.—Frankly, however, as I come out against this jumbling together of learned (1) advertisements, (2) reviews, (3) extracts, (4) verbal and (5) real criticisms, and (6) artistic judgments, still I am ready and glad to admit that the critical Fauna and Flora of the first five tables root out, perhaps, full as many shoots of weeds as they put forth themselves from their own germs; and I therefore appeal to a private letter of my own, which is beyond the suspicion of flattery, and wherein I associate it with a toadstool, which, although it produces, itself, upon an affusion (in this case, of ink), whole hosts of insects, nevertheless eradicates the flies.—But as among the reviewers there are also authors, like myself; as among the Portuguese inquisitors there are Jews; and, in fact, as I should want to talk whole intercalary years on the subject,—why talk a whole intercalary day?
S.
Stripes.—"He that knoweth his Lord's will, and doeth it not, shall receive double stripes."—Who, then, gets the single ones? Not he, surely, who knows not the will and does it not?—It follows, therefore, that greater knowledge, not aggravates, but itself creates, moral guilt; for in so far as I absolutely do not discern a moral obligation, my offence against it is surely not less, but none at all.
I will be my own Academy of Sciences, and assign to myself the following prize-question, which I will myself answer in a prize essay: "Since only such actions are virtuous as proceed from love for goodness, it follows that only those can be sinful which proceed from mere love of evil, and reference to self-interest must lessen the degree of a sin, as well as that of a virtue. But, on the other hand, what could there be but self-interest in our nature, which should impel us to what is bad? And if evil were done from a pure propensity to evil, then there would be a second, although opposite, autonomy[[235]] of the will."