50 FERDINAND TONNIES : again we are dealing with a concept of which the nature is constituted by individual or (generally) by social will. Men make each other mutually responsible, the community makes the citizens responsible, parents make their children respon- sible, custom, religion, law and morality make responsible only the man who corresponds to their idea of a rational man. Is it right and permitted that they should do so ? It is right and permitted in proportion as it is thoughtful and serves an end. But chiefly in the ethical sense we find that man makes himself responsible. And the superstition reflects itself again in false thought, in the fancy that men let them- selves be determined in their practical relations by psycho- logical theories. But the ultimate ground of this mistake is that lack of sociological, and therefore also of psychological, insight, which in its application to political maxims is still always held to be competence. 85. (E) Thus Philosophy moves, as it were, between two fires ; by those in front it is attacked as reactionary, by those behind as revolutionary. Its anxious situation betrays itself most clearly in the position assigned to it in the higher education and in public life. In the higher education, for in Germany at least the only part it plays is that of a tolerated safeguard for the citizen ; in many universities it maintains itself feebly by means of the still existing privilege of the "philosophical" faculties of granting the "philo- sophical" title of doctor, which has latterly possessed a certain market value, principally for young chemists who devote themselves to industry. For the rest, it is looked askance at by the followers of medicine and the natural sciences, and somewhat encouraged by Governments at the most where, like Psychology in certain respects, it is able to rise to these sciences. To this situation corresponds the badly organised state of the instruction itself. Lectures must be "popular" (gemeinverstdndlich), i.e. they must serve at least half for entertainment, like discourses for the lay-public. "Studies" for beginners are generally based upon Kant, because the untaught crowd cherishes the dark prejudice that to understand him in some degree is to penetrate into the secrets of philosophy ; moreover he is the national philosopher. But the method of beginning with Kant is as if we were to desire to teach children to read from the Coptic alphabet. Of the dreadful effects which popular lectures on the one side, and elementary instruction by the Kritik der reinen Vernunft on the other, have on the brains of students, we may often see traces, even in the most capable, especially when they venture overhastily upon
