Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/177

 clearly shows that it has a very different mission in view from that of procuring a livelihood for the poor in spirit.

But I return to my argument. By means of an amplification which only needed a little audacity, a theoretical oracle had been added to the practical oracle with which Kant had wrongly endowed Reason. The credit of this invention is no doubt due to F. H. Jacobi, from whom the professional philosophers joyfully and thankfully received the precious gift, as a means to help them out of the straits to which Kant had reduced them. That cool, calm, deliberate Reason, which Kant had criticized so mercilessly, was henceforth degraded to Understanding and known by this name; while Reason was supposed to denote an entirely imaginary, fictitious faculty, admitting us, as it were, to a little window overlooking the superlunar, nay, the supernatural world, through which all those truths are handed to us ready cut and dried, concerning which old-fashioned, honest, reflective Reason had for ages vainly argued and contended. And it is on such a mere product of the imagination, such a completely fictitious Reason as this, that German sham philosophy has been based for the last fifty years ; first, as the free construction and projection of the absolute Ego and the emanation from it of the non-Ego; then, as the intellectual intuition of absolute identity or indifference, and its evolutions to Nature ; or again, as the arising of God out of his dark depths or bottomless pit a la Jakob Böhme ; lastly, as the pure, self-thinking, absolute Idea, the scene of the ballet-dance of the self-moving conceptions—still, at the same time, always as immediate apprehension (Vernehmen) of the Divine, the supersensuous, the Deity, verity, beauty and as many other "-ties " as may be desired, or even as a mere