Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/232

 is scarcely less great than their hatred of me; precisely because all speculative Theology and all Rational Psychology—the bread-winners of these gentlemen—have been undermined, not to say irrevocably ruined, by him in the eyes of all serious thinkers. What! Not hate him? him, who has made their "trade in philosophy" so difficult to them, that they hardly see how to pull through honourably! So Kant and I are accordingly both bad, and these gentle men quite overlook us. For nearly forty years they have not deigned to cast a glance upon me, and now they look down condescendingly upon Kant from the heights of their wisdom, smiling in pity at his errors. This policy is both very wise and very profitable ; since they are thus able to hold forth at their ease volume after volume upon God and the soul, as if these were personalities with whom they were intimately acquainted, and to discourse upon the relation in which the former stands to the world and the latter to the body, just as if there had never been such a thing as a Critique of Pure Reason. When once the Critique of Pure Reason is done away with, all will go on splendidly! Now it is for this end that they have been endeavouring for many years quietly and gradually to set Kant aside, to make him obsolete, nay, to turn up their noses at him, and one being encouraged by the other in this, they are becoming bolder every day. They have no opposition to fear from their own colleagues, since they all have the same aims and the same mission and all together form a numerous coterie, the brilliant members of which, coram populo, bow and scrape to each other on all sides. Thus by degrees things have come to such a point, that the wretchedest compilers of manuals have the presumption to treat Kant's grand, immortal discoveries as antiquated errors, nay, calmly to set them aside with the most