Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/22

xviii wherever he had advanced what was incorrect or superfluous, or had even left out the best part, I have been obliged to interrupt the thread of his discourse. And this has happened often enough; so often, indeed, that some of my readers may perhaps think they hear an old man reading a young man's book aloud, while he frequently lets it drop, in order to indulge in digressions of his own on the same subject.

It is easy to see that a work thus corrected after so long an interval, could never acquire the unity and rounded completeness which only belong to such as are written in one breath. So great a difference will be found even in style and expression, that no reader of any tact can ever be in doubt whether it be the older or younger man who is speaking. For the contrast is indeed striking between the mild, unassuming tone in which the youth—who is still simple enough to believe quite seriously that for all whose pursuit is philosophy, truth, and truth alone, can have importance, and therefore that whoever promotes truth is sure of a welcome from them—propounds his arguments with confidence, and the firm, but also at times somewhat harsh voice of the old man, who in course of time has necessarily discovered the true character and real aims of the noble company of mercenary time-servers into which he has fallen. Nay, the just reader will hardly find fault with him should he occasionally give free vent to his indignation; since we see what comes of it when people who profess to have truth for their sole aim, are always occupied in studying the purposes of their powerful superiors, and when the e quovis ligno fit Mercurius is extended even to the greatest philosophers, and a clumsy charlatan, like Hegel, is calmly classed among them? Verily German Philosophy stands before us loaded with contempt, the laughing-stock of other nations, expelled from all honest science—like the prostitute who sells