Page:Decline of the West (Volume 2).djvu/29

 "understanding" (Verstand) is really that between the divination and flair belonging to our plant side, which merely makes use of the language of eye and word, and the understanding proper, belonging to our animal side, which is deduced from language. "Reason" in this sense is that which calls ideas into life, "understanding" that which finds truths. Truths are lifeless and can be imparted (mitgeteilt); ideas belong to the living self of the author and can only be sympathetically evoked (mitgefühlt). Understanding is essentially critical, "reason" essentially creative. The latter begets the object of its activity, the former starts from it. In fact, understanding criticism is first practised and developed in association with ordinary sensations — it is in sensation- judgments that the child learns to comprehend and to differentiate. Then, abstracted from this connexion and henceforward busied with itself, criticism needs a substitute for the sensation-activity that had previously served as its object. And this cannot be given it but by an already existing mode of thought, and it is upon this that criticism now works. This, only this, and not something building freely on nothingness, is Thought.

For quite early, before he has begun to think abstractly, primitive man forms for himself a religious world-picture, and this is the object upon which the understanding begins to operate critically. Always science has grown up on a religion and under all the spiritual prepossessions of that religion, and always it signifies nothing more or less than an abstract melioration of these doctrines, considered as false because less abstract. Always it carries along the kernel of a religion in its ensemble of principles, problem-enunciations, and methods. Every new truth that the understanding finds is nothing but a critical judgment upon some other that was already there. The polarity between old and new knowledge involves the consequence that in the world of the understanding there is only the relatively correct — namely, judgments of greater convincingness than other judgments. Critical knowledge rests upon the belief that the understanding of to-day is better than that of yesterday. And that which forces us to this belief, is again, life.

Can criticism then, as criticism, solve the great questions, or can it merely pose them? At the beginning of knowledge we believe the former. But the more we know, the more certain we become of the latter. So long as we hope, we call the secret a problem.

Thus, for mankind aware, there is a double problem, that of Waking-Being and that of Being; or of Space and of Time; or of the world-as-nature and the world as history; or of pulse and tension. The waking consciousness seeks to understand not only itself, but in addition something that is akin to itself. Though an inner voice may tell one that here all possibilities of knowl-