Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/164

 completely fictitious faculty, destined to help them out of the straits to which Kant had reduced them ; a faculty for direct, metaphysical knowledge: that is to say, one which transcends all possible experience, is able to grasp the world of things in themselves and their relations, and is therefore, before all, consciousness of God (Gottesbewusstsein) : that is, it knows God the Lord immediately, construes a priori the way in which he has created the Universe, or, should this sound too trivial, the way in which he has produced it out of himself, or to a certain degree generated it by some more or less necessary vital process, or again—as the most convenient proceeding, however comical it may appear—simply "dismissed" it, according to the custom of sovereigns at the end of an audience, and left it to get upon its legs by itself and walk away wherever it liked. Nothing less than the impudence of a scribbler of nonsense like Hegel, could, it is true, be found to venture upon this last step. Yet it is tom-foolery like this which, largely amplified, has filled hundreds of volumes for the last fifty years under the name of cognitions of Reason (Vernunfterkenntnisse), and forms the argument of so many works called philosophical by their authors, and scientific by others—one would think ironically—this expression being even repeated to satiety. Reason, to which all this wisdom is falsely and audaciously imputed, is pronounced to be a "super sensuous faculty," or a faculty "for ideas;" in short, an oracular power lying within us, designed directly for Metaphysics. During the last half-century, however, there has been considerable discrepancy of opinion among the adepts as to the way in which all these super-sensuous wonders are perceived. According to the most audacious, Reason has a direct intuition of the Absolute, or even ad libitum of the Infinite and of its evolutions towards the Finite. Others, somewhat less bold, opine that its mode of receiving this information partakes rather of