Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 1.djvu/39

 the public to look and note the air of importance with which they congratulate themselves on the event. Who can mistake the object of such proceedings? Is there then nothing to oppose to the maxim, primum vivere, deinde philosophari? These gentlemen desire to live, and indeed to live by philosophy. To philosophy they are assigned with their wives and children, and in spite of Petrarch's povera e nuda vai filosofia, they have staked everything upon it. Now my philosophy is by no means so constituted that any one can live by it. It lacks the first indispensable requisite of a well-paid professional philosophy, a speculative theology, which—in spite of the troublesome Kant with his Critique of Reason—should and must, it is supposed, be the chief theme of all philosophy, even if it thus takes on itself the task of talking straight on of that of which it can know absolutely nothing. Indeed my philosophy does not permit to the professors the fiction they have so cunningly devised, and which has become so indispensable to them, of a reason that knows, perceives, or apprehends immediately and absolutely. This is a doctrine which it is only necessary to impose upon the reader at starting, in order to pass in the most comfortable manner in the world, as it were in a chariot and four, into that region beyond the possibility of all experience, which Kant has wholly and for ever shut out from our knowledge, and in which are found immediately revealed and most beautifully arranged the fundamental dogmas of modern, Judaising, optimistic Christianity. Now what in the world has my subtle philosophy, deficient as it is in these essential requisites, with no intentional aim, and unable to afford a means of subsistence, whose pole star is truth alone