hand, we can ascribe to the work of the great philosopher, as to that of the great artist, an imperishable, unchangeable presentation of the world, not disappearing with time, and which, because it was the expression of a great mind, will always find a school of men to adhere to it. There still exist disciples of Plato and Aristotle, of Spinoza and Berkeley and Bruno, but there are now none who denote themselves as followers of Galileo or Helmholtz, of Ptolemy or Copernicus. It is a misuse of terms, due to erroneous ideas, to speak of the "classics" of science or of pedagogy in the sense that we speak of the classics of philosophy and art.
The great philosopher bears the name of genius deservedly and with honour. And if it will always be the greatest pain to the philosopher that he is not an artist, so the artist envies the philosopher his tenacious and controlled strength of systematic thought, and it is not surprising that the artist has taken pleasure in depicting Prometheus and Faust, Prospera and Cyprian, Paul the Apostle and II Penseroso. The philosopher and the artist are alternate sides of one another.
We must not be too lavish in attributing genius to those who are philosophers or we shall not escape the reproach of being merely partisans of philosophy against science. Such a partisanship is foreign to my purpose, and, I hope, to this book. It would only be absurd to discuss the claims to genius of such men as Anaxagoras, Geulincx, Baader, or Emerson. I deny genius either to such unoriginally profound writers as Angelus Silesius, Philo and Jacobi, or to original yet superficial persons such as Comte, Feuerbach, Hume, Herbart, Locke and Karneades. The history of art is equally full of preposterous valuations, whilst, on the other hand, the history of science is extremely free from false estimations. The history of science busies itself very little with the biographies of its protagonists; its object is a system of objective, collective knowledge in which the individual is swept away. The service of science demands the greatest sacrifice, for in it the individual human being renounces all claim to eternity as such.
