Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/165

 audition than of vision ; since it does not exactly see, but merely hears (vernimmt), what is going on in "cloud-cuckoo-land" (νεφελοκοκκυγία.), and then honestly transmits what it has thus received to the Understanding, to be worked up into text-books. According to a pun of Jacobi's, even the German name for Reason, "Vernunft" is derived from this pretended "Vernehmen ; "whereas it evidently comes from that "Vernehmen" which is conveyed by language and conditioned by Reason, and by which the distinct perception of words and their meaning is designated, as opposed to mere sensuous hearing which animals have also. This miserable jeu de mots nevertheless continues, after half a century, to find favour; it passes for a serious thought, nay even for a proof, and has been repeated over and over again. The most modest among the adepts again assert, that Reason neither sees nor hears, therefore it receives neither a vision nor a report of all these wonders, and has a mere vague Ahndung, or misgiving of them ; but then they drop the d, by which the word (Ahnung) acquires a peculiar touch of silliness, which, backed up as it is by the sheepish look of the apostle for the time being of this wisdom, cannot fail to gain it entrance.

My readers know that I only admit the word idea in its primitive, that is Platonic, sense, and that I have treated this point at length and exhaustively in the Third Book of my chief work. The French and English, on the other hand, certainly attach a very commonplace, but quite clear and definite meaning to the word idée, or idea ; whereas the Germans lose their heads as soon as they hear the word Ideen; all presence of mind abandons them, and they feel as if they were about to ascend in a balloon. Here therefore was a field of action for our adepts in intellectual intuition ; so the most impudent of them, the notorious charlatan