There are two very different classes of philosophical heads--which,
since Kant has introduced into philosophy the idea of positive and
negative quantities, I shall willingly classify by means of that
distinction. The positive intellect is, like the poet, in conjunction
with the outer world, the father of an inner world; and, like the poet
also, holds up a transforming mirror in which the entangled and
distorted members as they are seen in our actual experience enter into
new combinations which compose a fair and luminous world: the
hypothesis of Idealism (i. e. the Fichtean system) the Monads and the
Pre-established Harmony of Leibnitz--and Spinozism are all births of a
genial moment, and not the wooden carving of logical toil. Such men
therefore as Leibnitz, Plato, Herder, &c., I call positive intellects;
because they seek and yield the positive; and because their inner
world, having raised itself higher out of the water than in others,
thereby overlooks a larger prospect of island and continents. A
negative head, on the other hand, discovers by its acuteness--not any
positive truths, but the negative (i. e. the errors) of other people.
Such an intellect, as for example Bayle, one of the greatest of that
class,--appraises the funds of others, rather than brings any fresh
funds of his own. In lieu of the obscure ideas which he finds he gives
us clear ones: but in this there is no positive accession to our
knowledge; for all that the clear idea contains in development exists
already by implication in the obscure idea. Negative intellects of
every age are unanimous in their abhorrence of everything positive.
Impulse, feeling, instinct--everything, in short, which is
incomprehensible, they can endure just once--that is, at the summit of
their chain of arguments as a sort of hook on which they may hang
them,--but never afterwards.