Page:Immanuel Kant - Dreams of a Spirit-Seer - tr. Emanuel Fedor Goerwitz (1900).djvu/118

100 to be rationally proved. Add to this that they call this road the road a priori, although they have imperceptibly directed it to the point a posteriori, by following a road already staked out. They do not tell you that, of course, because it is only fair for the initiated not to betray the tricks of the profession. With this ingenious method several men of merit have caught even secrets of religion by pure reasoning; just as a novelist makes the heroine flee into remote countries that there, by a lucky adventure, she haply may meet her lover; "et fugit ad salices, et se cupit ante videri." (Virgil). With such celebrated predecessors, I need not have been ashamed even if I really had made use of the same trick to help my work to a good ending. But I earnestly beg of the reader not to believe such a thing of me. Anyhow, of what use would it be to me now when I can deceive nobody any more, having given away the secret? Moreover, I undergo this misfortune, that the testimony which I have stumbled upon, and which resembles so uncommonly the philosophical creation of my own brain, looks desperately misshapen and foolish, so that I must rather expect the reader to consider my reasons as absurd on account of their relation to such confirmations, than that he will consider these latter reasonable on account of my reasons. I therefore declare without more ado that in regard to the alleged examples I mean no joke, and I declare once for all, that either one has to suppose more intelligence and truth to be in Swedenborg's works than a first glance will reveal, or that it is only chance when