Page:Egotism in German Philosophy (1916).djvu/42

 nucleus for my discoveries and for the terms, such as great-grandfather, in which I express them—for it was no intrinsic property of that worthy man that he was to become my great-grandfather after his death, or that I was to discover him.

This vortex which things, as apprehension catches them, seem to form round each whirling spectator, is the fascinating theme of lyric poetry, of psychological novels, and of German philosophy. Dominated as this philosophy is by the transcendental method, it regards views, and the history and logic of views, as more primitive and important than the objects which these views have in common. The genial Professor Paulsen of Berlin (whose pupil I once had the advantage of being) had a phrase that continually recurred in his lectures: Man kann sagen, as much as to say, Things will yield the following picture, if one cares to draw it. And he once wrote an article in honour of Kant very pertinently entitled: Was uns Kant sein kann; because no veritable disciple of Kant accepts what Kant taught as he taught it, but each rises from the study of the master having irresistibly formed one or more systems of his own. To take what views we will of things, if things will barely suffer us to take them, and then to declare that the things are mere terms in the views we take of them—that is transcendentalism.