is, they put what they have to say into forced and involved language, create new words and prolix periods which go round the thought and cover it up.  They hesitate between the two attempts of communicating the thought and of concealing it.  They want to make it look grand so that it has the appearance of being learned and profound, thereby giving one the idea that there is much more in it than one perceives at the moment.  Accordingly, they sometimes put down their thoughts in bits, in short, equivocal, and paradoxical sentences which appear to mean much more than they say (a splendid example of this kind of writing is furnished by Schelling’s treatises on Natural Philosophy); sometimes they express their thoughts in a crowd of words and the most intolerable diffuseness, as if it were necessary to make a sensation in order to make the profound meaning of their phrases intelligible—­while it is quite a simple idea if not a trivial one (examples without number are supplied in Fichte’s popular works and in the philosophical pamphlets of a hundred other miserable blockheads that are not worth mentioning), or else they endeavour to use a certain style in writing which it has pleased them to adopt—­for example, a style that is so thoroughly Kat’ e’xochae’u profound and scientific, where one is tortured to death by the narcotic effect of long-spun periods that are void of all thought (examples of this are specially supplied by those most impertinent of all mortals, the Hegelians in their Hegel newspaper commonly known as Jahrbuecher der wissenschaftlichen Literatur); or again, they aim at an intellectual style where it seems then as if they wish to go crazy, and so on.  All such efforts whereby they try to postpone the nascetur ridiculus mus make it frequently difficult to understand what they really mean.  Moreover, they write down words, nay, whole periods, which mean nothing in themselves, in the hope, however, that some one else will understand something from them.  Nothing else is at the bottom of all such endeavours but the inexhaustible attempt which is always venturing on new paths, to sell words for thoughts, and by means of new expressions, or expressions used in a new sense, turns of phrases and combinations of all kinds, to produce the appearance of intellect in order to compensate for the want of it which is so painfully felt.  It is amusing to see how, with this aim in view, first this mannerism and then that is tried; these they intend to represent the mask of intellect:  this mask may possibly deceive the inexperienced for a while, until it is recognised as being nothing but a dead mask, when it is laughed at and exchanged for another.