Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/237

 when the tale hath been told, he will say, 'What is the matter?'" For that diamond in Kant's crown, Transcendental Aesthetic, never has existed for these gentlemen—it is tacitly set aside as non-avenue. I wonder what they think Nature means by producing the rarest of all her works, a great mind, one among so many hundreds of millions, if the worshipful company of numskulls are to be able at their pleasure and by their mere counter-assertion to annul the weightiest doctrines emanating from that mind, let alone to treat them with disregard and do as if they did not exist.

But this degenerate, barbarous state of philosophy which, in the present day, emboldens every tyro to hold forth at random upon subjects that have puzzled the greatest minds, is precisely a consequence still remaining of the impunity with which—thanks to the connivance of our professors of philosophy—that audacious scribbler, Hegel, has been allowed to flood the market with his monstrous vagaries and so to pass for the greatest of all philosophers for the last thirty years in Germany. Every one, of course, now thinks himself entitled to serve up confidently any thing that may happen to come into his sparrow's brain.

Therefore, as I have said, the gentlemen of the 'philosophical trade' are anxious above all to obliterate Kant's philosophy in order to be able to return to the muddy canal of the old dogmatism and to talk at random to their heart's content upon the favourite subjects which are specially recommended to them, just as if nothing had happened and neither a Kant nor a Critical Philosophy had ever come into the world. The affected veneration for, and laudation of, Leibniz too, which has been showing itself everywhere for some years, proceed from the same