Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/43

 only make Kantists, but no Kants? In the same § Kant says: "Everything that Newton has written in his immortal Principia, though such a large head was required to invent it, can be learned; but to compose spirited poems cannot be taught, however complete the instructions for learning the art may be. The reason is, that Newton can explain all the steps he had to take, from the first elements of geometry to his grandest and most profound inventions; he can explain them, not alone to himself, but to others, even to the remote descendants, while no Homer or Wieland can show how his ideally rich, and yet thoughtful characters, came forth from his brain; for he knows it not himself, and therefore cannot teach it others."

I had hoped that I could depend upon Kant, who has a million times more intelligence than I have, as upon a mental Chargé d' Affaires; but when I came to this passage (and to those upon repentance, music, the origin of evil, &c.), I saw I must myself follow him, and not only pray after him, as I had before done, but reflect. But to return! Certainly Newton's "Principles" can be learned, that is, the new ones may be repeated, but that also can happen to the invented poems; yet you can be taught to invent them as little as Newton's Principles. A new philosophic idea seems, after its birth, to lie more clearly in its former seed-vessels and organic molecules than a poetic one; but why was Newton the first to see it? He and Kant can discover, no better than Shakespeare or Leibnitz, how the beginning of a new idea suddenly bursts from the cloud of old ones; they can show their Nexus (else they would not be human ones) with the old ones, but not their conception from it; the same holds of the poetic. Let Kant teach us to invent systems and truths (not to prove them, though, strictly speaking, the one is closely allied to the other), then he shall be taught to invent epics, and I will be responsible for it. He seems to me to confound the difficulty of forming ideas with the less important one of forming new ones; the difficulty of transition with the inexplicability of the matter. I fear and wonder at the latent almightiness with which man orders, that is, creates his range of ideas. I know no better symbol of creation than the regularity and causality of the creation of ideas in us, which no will and no mind can regulate and create, for any such arrangement and intention would presuppose the unborn idea. And in this creation the grand enigma of our moral freedom is veiled. Are new systems discovered by syllogisms, yet they are proved and tried by them? Can, then, the connection of a new philo-