Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/127

103 him, really fancy that they have actually comprehended the whole thing at one stroke. I myself have heard this feeling expressed by diligent young readers, who have assured me, after their first trial of the “Critique,” that, as they supposed, it must be that they had somehow failed to understand Kant, for whereas people said he was hard, they themselves hadn’t found anything very difficult in the book at all. To their great alarm, as it were, they hadn’t even been puzzled. Yet when such persons come to read Kant a second time, I fear that they usually find themselves considerably puzzled; or rather, I should say that I hope so. Puzzle is a sensation that soon comes, when one begins to examine Kant more cautiously and worthily. The first superficial joy in his power, in his skill, in his subtlety, in his fearlessness, fades away. One sees his actual doctrine looming afar off, a mountain yet to be climbed. On nearer approach, one finds the mountain well wooded; and the woods have thick underbrush. The paths lose themselves in the dark valleys, leading this way and that, with most contradictory windings. Kant is a pedantic creature after all, one says. He loves hard words. He takes a mass of them, — as one of his critics fiercely says, he takes a mass of Latin terms ending in tion, and translates them into so many equivalent vernacular terms, ending in the German in heit and keit and he calls this sort of thing philosophy! Getting such things through the medium of an English translation doesn’t improve them. One begins to anathematize the poor translator, Meiklejohn, in fear lest one should blaspheme instead the sacred name of the immortal Kant. One finally concludes that this is a book full of great insights and of noble passages, but that the real connections aren’t to be made out until one shall have fought the good fight in German. And so one drops the subject until one’s German shall be free.

That happy time comes. One has first read Schopenhauer