Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/264

 232 THE WILL IN NATURE.

colour-theory, with which these numbers are in direct contradiction? Finally, I should like to know how it came, that during the thousands of years in which men have thought and written, no one but myself and Professor Rosas should ever have thought of using just these particular fractions to denote colours? For the words I have quoted above tell us that he would have stated those fractions precisely as he has done, even had I not chanced to do it already fourteen years before and thus needlessly anticipated his statement; they also tell us, that all that is required is to wish, in order to do so. Now it is precisely in these numerical fractions that the secret of colours lies: by them alone can we rightly solve the mystery of their nature and of their difference from one another. I should however be heartily glad, were plagiarism the worst kind of dishonesty that denied German literature; there are others far more mischievous, which penetrate more deeply, and to which plagiarism bears the same proportion as picking pockets in a mild way to capital crime. I allude to that mean, despicable spirit, whose lodestar is personal interest, when it ought to be truth, and in which the voice of intention makes itself heard beneath the mask of insight. Double-dealing and time-serving are the order of the day. Tartuffe comedies are performed without rouge; nay, Capuchin sermons are preached in halls consecrated to Science; enlightenment, that once revered word, has become a term of opprobrium; the greatest thinkers of the past century, Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, Hume, are slandered, those heroes, ornaments and benefactors of mankind, whose fame, diffused throughout both hemispheres, can only be increased, if by anything, by the fact that wherever and whenever obscurantists show them selves, it is as their bitterest enemies and with good reason. Literary coteries and associations are formed to deal out praise and blame, and spurious merit is then trumpeted