authorisation. The public was compelled to see that what is obscure is not always without significance; consequently, what was without significance took refuge behind obscure language. Fichte was the first to seize this new privilege and use it vigorously; Schelling at least equalled him; and a host of hungry scribblers, without talent and without honesty, soon outbade them both. But the height of audacity, in serving up pure nonsense, in stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had previously only been heard in madhouses, was finally reached in Hegel, and became the instrument of the most barefaced general mystification that has ever taken place, with a result which will appear fabulous to posterity, and will remain as a monument of German stupidity. In vain, meanwhile, Jean Paul wrote his beautiful paragraph, "Higher criticism of philosophical madness in the professorial chair, and poetical madness in the theatre" (Æsthetische Nachschule); for in vain Goethe had already said –
"They prate and teach, and no one interferes;
All from the fellowship of fools are shrinking;
Man usually believes, if only words he hears,
That also with them goes material for thinking."[1]
But let us return to Kant. We are compelled to admit that he entirely lacks grand, classical simplicity, naïveté, ingénuité, candeur. His philosophy has no analogy with Grecian architecture, which presents large simple proportions revealing themselves at once to the glance; on the contrary, it reminds us strongly of the Gothic style of building. For a purely individual characteristic of Kant's mind is a remarkable love of symmetry, which delights in a varied multiplicity, so that it may reduce it to order, and repeat this order in subordinate orders, and so on indefinitely, just as happens in Gothic churches. Indeed, he sometimes carries this to the extent of trifling, and from love of this tendency he goes so far as to do open
1 "Faust," scene vi., Bayard Taylor's translation, vol. i. p. 134. – Trs.
- ↑ 1
