Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/170

 the help of experience. They are invariably based upon principles which have transcendental or metalogical truth.

A Reason, on the other hand, which supplies material knowledge primarily out of its own resources and conveys positive information transcending the sphere of possible experience; a Reason which, in order to do this, must necessarily contain innate ideas, is a pure fiction, invented by our professional philosophers and a product of the terror with which Kant's Critique of Pure Reason has inspired them. I wonder now, whether these gentlemen know a certain Locke and whether they have ever read his works? Perhaps they may have done so in times long gone by, cursorily and superficially, while looking down complacently on this great thinker from the heights of their own conscious superiority: may be, too, in some inferior German translation; for I do not yet see that the knowledge of modern languages has increased in proportion to the deplorable decrease in that of ancient ones. How could time besides be found for such old croakers as Locke, when even a real, thorough knowledge of Kant's Philosophy at present hardly exists excepting in a very few, very old heads? The youth of the generation now at its maturity had of course to be spent in the study of "Hegel's gigantic mind," of the "sublime Schleiermacher," and of the "acute Herbart." Alas! alas! the great mischief in academical hero-worship of this sort, and in the glorification of university celebrities by worthy colleagues in office or hopeful aspirants to it, is precisely, that ordinary intellects—Nature's mere manufactured ware—are presented to honest credulous youths of immature judgment, as master minds, exceptions and ornaments of mankind. The students forthwith throw all their energies into the barren study of the endless, insipid scribblings of such mediocrities, thus wasting the short, invaluable period allotted to them for higher education, instead of using it