of thought in the way which is most real, most useful and most appropriate; he has to form the best concepts, i.e. the concepts which conform most perfectly to that end; and he has to coin and connect with those concepts signs, which shall be the most useful, the most convenient and the most easily understood. Not every one, not the apprentice or the journeyman, will feel himself equal to so high an art, and Goethe’s verse of the mason is peculiarly appropriate here:—
- Wer soll Lehrling sein?—jedermann.
Wer soll Geselle sein?—der was kann.
Wer soll Meister sein?—der was ersann.[1]
- Wer soll Lehrling sein?—jedermann.
But all alike must know that they belong to a great alliance which runs through all nations, the Republic of scholars; and to work in and for this, to be recognised in it and to find in it a following and co-operation, has always been the highest aim of the master. There at once the individual will, at the height of its enjoyment of power and of its artist’s pride, finds itself over against a more powerful social will which commands its respect, and which, forming itself in a council wherein the most distinguished masters have the greatest natural weight, and exercising its office of distinction and selection, determines with decisive sovereignty, what is to hold universally, what permanently, and what both universally and permanently.
How little progress we have made in the scientific knowledge of man—which is the essential business of all Psychology and Philosophy in the modern sense—we may estimate from the fact that we have attained to so extraordinarily little clearness and agreement concerning the objects and methods of these sciences. At any rate we shall allow, what we seldom act upon, that we must not philosophise in words alone, but that the word is a sign indifferent in itself, the value of which depends entirely upon its being appropriately formed and upon its serving to arouse the desired clear and distinct idea, or—in proper, that is abstract, thought—to recall the activity whereby we, or another, or all in common, formed a concept, and thereby to recall the content of the concept. Much less do we recognise the possibility and importance of free choice in the formation of concepts, or we tend to confuse it with the mere determining of the meaning of a word. And yet we have here the source of the mastery of the greatest problems.
- ↑ Who must be apprentice? every one. Who must be journeyman? he who can do something. Who must be master? he who has invented something.
