at another time it was the industrious worker who
had got a scent of OTIUM and refined luxuriousness
in the internal economy of the philosopher, and felt
himself aggrieved and belittled thereby. On another
occasion it was the colour-blindness of the utilitarian,
who sees nothing in philosophy but a series of refuted
systems, and an extravagant expenditure which “does
nobody any good”. At another time the fear
of disguised mysticism and of the boundary-adjustment
of knowledge became conspicuous, at another time the
disregard of individual philosophers, which had involuntarily
extended to disregard of philosophy generally.
In fine, I found most frequently, behind the proud
disdain of philosophy in young scholars, the evil
after-effect of some particular philosopher, to whom
on the whole obedience had been foresworn, without,
however, the spell of his scornful estimates of other
philosophers having been got rid of—the
result being a general ill-will to all philosophy.
(Such seems to me, for instance, the after-effect
of Schopenhauer on the most modern Germany: by
his unintelligent rage against Hegel, he has succeeded
in severing the whole of the last generation of Germans
from its connection with German culture, which culture,
all things considered, has been an elevation and a
divining refinement of the historical sense,
but precisely at this point Schopenhauer himself was
poor, irreceptive, and un-German to the extent of
ingeniousness.) On the whole, speaking generally,
it may just have been the humanness, all-too-humanness
of the modern philosophers themselves, in short, their
contemptibleness, which has injured most radically
the reverence for philosophy and opened the doors
to the instinct of the populace. Let it but be
acknowledged to what an extent our modern world diverges
from the whole style of the world of Heraclitus, Plato,
Empedocles, and whatever else all the royal and magnificent
anchorites of the spirit were called, and with what
justice an honest man of science may feel himself
of a better family and origin, in view of such representatives
of philosophy, who, owing to the fashion of the present
day, are just as much aloft as they are down below—in
Germany, for instance, the two lions of Berlin, the
anarchist Eugen Duhring and the amalgamist Eduard
von Hartmann. It is especially the sight of those
hotch-potch philosophers, who call themselves “realists,”
or “positivists,” which is calculated to
implant a dangerous distrust in the soul of a young
and ambitious scholar those philosophers, at the best,
are themselves but scholars and specialists, that
is very evident! All of them are persons who
have been vanquished and brought back again
under the dominion of science, who at one time or
another claimed more from themselves, without having
a right to the “more” and its responsibility—and
who now, creditably, rancorously, and vindictively,
represent in word and deed, disbelief in the