In Troilus and Cressida Thersites says: "Shall the elephant Ajax carry it thus? He beats me, and I rail at him: O worthy satisfaction! would it were otherwise; that I could beat him, whilst he railed at me." Dostoevsky might have said the same of his opponents. He pursued them with stings, sarcasm, abuse, and they drove him to a white heat by their quiet assurance and composure.... The present-day admirers of Dostoevsky quietly believe in the teachings of their master. Does it not mean that de facto they have betrayed him and gone over to the side of his enemies.
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The opinion has gained ground that Turgenev's ideal women—Natalie, Elena, Marianna—are created in the image and likeness of Poushkin's Tatyana. The critics have been misled by external appearances. To Poushkin his Tatyana appears as a vestal guarding the sacred flame of high morality—because such a job is not fitting for a male. The Pretender in Boris Godunov says to the old monk Pimen, who preaches meekness and submission: "But you fought under the walls of Kazan, etc." That is a man's work. But in the hours of peace and leisure the fighter needs his own hearth-side, he must feel assured that at home his rights are safely guarded. This is the point of Tatyana's last words: "I belong to another, and shall remain forever true to him." But in Turgenev woman appears as the judge and the reward, sometimes even the inspirer of victorious man. There is a great difference.
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From a German Introduction to Philosophy.—"We shall maintain the opinion that metaphysics, as the crown of the particular sciences, is possible and desirable, and that to it falls the task intermediate between theory and practice, experiment and anticipation, mind and feeling, the task of weighing probabilities, balancing arguments, and reconciling difficulties." Thus metaphysics is a weighing of probabilities. Ergo—further than probable conclusions it cannot go. Thus why do metaphysicians pretend to universal and obligatory, established and eternal judgments? They go beyond themselves. In the domain of metaphysics there cannot and must not be any established beliefs. The word established loses all its sense in the connection. It is reasonable to speak of eternal hesitation and temporality of thought.
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From another Introduction to Philosophy, also German. "Compared with the delusion of the materialists ... the wretchedest worshipper of idols seems to us a being capable of apprehending to a certain degree the great meaning and essence of things," Perhaps this thought strayed in accidentally among the huge herd of the other thoughts of the professor, so little does it resemble the rest. But even so, it loses none of its interest. If the materialists here spoken of, those of the nineteenth century, Buchner, Vogt, Moleschot, all of them men who stood on the pinnacle of natural science, were capable of proving in the realm of philosophy more uninformed than the nakedest savage, then it follows, not only that science has nothing in common with philosophy, but that the two are even hostile. Therefore we ought to go to the savages, not to civilise them, but even to learn philosophy from them. A Papuan or a Tierra del Fuegan delivering a lecture in philosophy to the professors of the Berlin University—Friedrich Paulsen, for example—is a curious sight. I say to Friedrich Paulsen, and not to Buchner or Moleschot, because Paulsen is also an educated person, and therefore his philosophic sensibility may have suffered from contact with science, even if not so badly as that of the materialists. He needs the assistance of a red-skinned master. Why have German professors so little daring or enterprise? Why should not Paulsen, on his own initiative, go to Patagonia to perfect himself in philosophy?—or at least send his pupils there, and preach broadcast the new pilgrimage. And now lo and behold he has hatched an original and fertile idea, so he will stick in a corner with it, so that even if you wanted you could not get a good look at it. The idea is important and weighty: our philosophers would lose nothing by sitting at the feet of the savages.
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From a History of Ethics.—"Doubts concerning the existence or the possibility of discovering a moral norm have, of course (I underline it), proved a stimulus to a new speculative establishing of ethics, just as the denial of the possibility of knowledge led to the discovery of the condition of knowledge." With this proposition the author does not play hide-and-seek, as Paulsen with his. He places it in a conspicuous position, in a conspicuous section of his book, and accompanies it with the trumpeting herald "of course." But only one thing is clear: namely, that the majority share the opinion of Professor Yodl, to whom the quoted words belong. So that the first assumption of ethics has as its foundation the consensus sapientium. It is enough.
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