Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/254

 this price he is ready to do anything he is asked to do, even to deduce a priori, nay, should it come to the worst, to perceive the 'Devil and his dam,' by intellectual intuition—and here indeed the exceedingly comical effect is brought to a climax by the contrast between the sublimity of the ostensible, and the lowliness of the real, aim. It remains nevertheless desirable, that the pure, sacred precincts of philosophy should be cleansed of all such traders, as was the temple of Jerusalem in former times of the buyers and sellers.—Biding such better times therefore, may our philosophical public bestow its attention and interest as it has done hitherto. May it continue as before invariably naming Fichte as an obbligato accompaniment to, and in the same breath with, Kant—that great mind, produced but once by Nature, which has illumined its own depth, as if forsooth they were of the same kind; and this without a single voice being heard to exclaim in protest 'Ηρακλῆς καὶ πίθηκος! May Hegel's philosophy of absolute nonsense—three-fourths cash and one-fourth crazy fancies—continue to pass for unfathomable wisdom without anyone suggesting as an appropriate motto for his writings Shakespeare's words: "Such stuff as madmen tongue and brain not," or, as an emblematical vignette, the cuttle-fish with its ink-bag, creating a cloud of darkness around it to prevent people from seeing what it is, with the device: mea caligine tutus.—May each day bring us, as hitherto, new systems adapted for University purposes, entirely made up of words and phrases and in a learned jargon besides, which allows people to talk whole days without saying anything; and may these delights never be disturbed by the Arabian proverb: "I hear the clappering of the mill, but I see no flour."—For all this is in accordance with the age and must have its course. In all times some such thing occupies the contemporary public more or less noisily; then it dies off so completely, vanishes so entirely, without