Philosophy.--Some critical philosophers have now borrowed from the
algebra a mathematical method, without which one cannot for a single
minute--not so much think as--write philosophically. The algebraist, by
the transposition of mere _letters_, catches truths which no chain of
reasoning could ever draw out of the deep. In this the critical
philosopher has imitated him, but with greater advantage. As he
cleverly mixes together, not letters, but whole _technical words_,
there rises from the alliteration of the same a cream of truths which
he could hardly have dreamed of. Such philosophers are forbidden, and
rightly, like the preachers of Gotha (Goth. Public Ordinances, P. III.
p. 16), to use allegories, or any flower of speech, which, as other
flowers do for the drawing-hounds, would spoil the scent.--Properly,
however, the picturesque style is more definite than the technical
word-style, which finally, as all _abstract words are pictures_, is
also itself a picturesque style, only one full of pictures that have
run out and faded. Jacobi is not obscure in consequence of his
_images_, but in consequence of the new _ideas_ which through them he
would communicate to us.
I have lately been looking over the birth-lists of the learned and
teaching republic, and counting up the young little Kants whom the old
Kant--otherwise unmarried, like his cousin Newton--has for the last ten
Fairs begotten. Demetrius Magnus, who wanted to make a book of authors
of the same name, must have been very stupid, if he had undertaken to
write in our times, and yet at the same time, though he nevertheless
communicated that there had been sixteen Platos, twenty Socrateses,
twenty-eight Pythagorases, thirty-two Aristotles, had very sinfully
omitted to say that there are now as many philosophers and
philosophists as those make when reckoned all together--namely,
ninety-six--who could bear the name of Kant,--that is, if they chose
to. Such mechanics--thus may I call the magisters, because formerly the
mechanics, inversely, were called magisters, and the upper master
arch-magister--one should take into account as the best propaganda
which bulky books can have. They are, at best, competent to diffuse the
system, because they know how to separate from it the incomprehensible,
the spiritual, and to extract what is popular and palpable, i. e. the
words for readers, who, otherwise simple, nevertheless would not die
without a critical philosophy. The most miserable theological and
æsthetic stone receives now a Kantian setting in words. Although every
new system introduces a certain _one-sidedness_ of view into all
heads,--especially as every cold philosopher has so much the more
_one-sidedness_, precisely as he has the more _insight_,--still that is
no matter; for great bars of truth come forth through the joint digging
of the whole thinking-works.[234] Whoever has seen Kant standing on his
mountain among his learned fellow-laborers, is reminded with pleasure
of a similar incident in Peru, which Buffon communicates. When
Condamine and Bouger were measuring there the equatorial degrees of the
earth (as Kant did of the intellectual world), whole troops of apes
appeared as coadjutors, put on spectacles, looked at the stars and down
at the clocks, and reduced one thing and another to writing, although
without salary, which is their only distinction from the vicariate
Kants.
Every man of genius is a philosopher, but not the reverse. A
philosopher without fancy, without history, and without a _general
knowledge_ of the most important things, is more one-sided than a
politician. Whoever has adopted, rather than discovered, a system;
whoever has not had beforehand dark presentiments thereof; whoever has
not at least pined for it beforehand; in short, whoever does not bring
with him a soul like a full, warm, ground filled with germs, which
waits only for its summer,--such a one may indeed be a teacher, but not
a scholar of the philosophy which he degrades to a mercenary
profession; and, briefly, it is all one what place one climbs as his
philosophical observatory,--a throne, or a Pegasus, or an Alp, or a
Cæsar's-couch, or a bier,--and they are almost all higher than the desk
in a lecture-room and hall of disputation.
Q (_see_ K).