frees itself from confiding acceptance, it is marching to self-destruction, after which what remains is simply and solely technical experience.
Belief, in its primitive, unclear condition, acknowledges superior sources of wisdom by which things that man's own subtlety could never unravel are more or less manifest — such as prophetic words, dreams, oracles, sacred scriptures, the voice of the deity. The critical spirit, on the contrary, wants, and believes itself able, to look into everything for itself. It not only mistrusts alien truths, but even denies their possibility. Truth, for it, is only knowledge that it has proved for itself. But if pure criticism creates its means out of itself solely, it did not long go unperceived that this position assumed the reality of the result. De omnibus dubitandum is a proposition that is incapable of being actualized. It is apt to be forgotten that critical activity must rest upon a method, and the possibility of obtaining this method in turn by the way of criticism is only apparent. For, in reality, it follows from the momentary disposition of the thought.[1] That is, the results of criticism themselves are determined by the basic method, but this in turn is determined by the stream of being which carries and perfuses the waking-consciousness. The belief in a knowledge that needs no postulates is merely a mark of the immense naivete of rationalist periods. A theory of natural science is nothing but a historically older dogma in another shape. And the only profit from it is that which life obtains, in the shape of a successful technique, to which theory has provided the key. It has already been said that the value of a working hypothesis resides not in its "correctness" but in its usableness. But discoveries of another sort, findings of insight, "Truths" in the optimistic sense, cannot be the outcome of purely scientific understanding, since this always presupposes an existing view upon which its critical, dissecting activity can operate; the natural science of the Baroque is one continuous dissection of the religious world-picture of the Gothic.
The aim of faith and science, fear and curiosity, is not to experience life, but to know the world-as-nature. Of world-as-history they are the express negation. But the secret of waking-consciousness is a twofold one; two fear-born, causally ordered pictures arise for the inner eye — the "outer world" and as its counter-image the "inner world." In both are true problems, and the waking-consciousness is not only a look-out, but is very busy within its own domains as well. The Numen out there is called God; in here Soul. By the critical understanding the deities of the believer's vision are transmuted in thought into mechanical magnitudes referable to its world, but their essence and kernel remain the same — Classical matter and form, Magian light and darkness, Faustian force and mass — and its mode is ever the same dissection
- ↑ And even so the thought has a different disposition according as it is primitive or cultured; Chinese, Indian, Classical, Magian, or Western; and even German, English, or French. In the last resort, there are not even two individuals with exactly the same method.
