perhaps some slight admixture of satiety and scorn, which can no longer endure the BRIC-A-BRAC of ideas of the most varied origin, such as so-called Positivism at present throws on the market; a disgust of the more refined taste at the village-fair motleyness and patchiness of all these reality-philosophasters, in whom there is nothing either new or true, except this motleyness.  Therein it seems to me that we should agree with those skeptical anti-realists and knowledge-microscopists of the present day; their instinct, which repels them from modern reality, is unrefuted . . . what do their retrograde by-paths concern us!  The main thing about them is not that they wish to go “back,” but that they wish to get away therefrom.  A little more strength, swing, courage, and artistic power, and they would be off—­and not back!

11.  It seems to me that there is everywhere an attempt at present to divert attention from the actual influence which Kant exercised on German philosophy, and especially to ignore prudently the value which he set upon himself.  Kant was first and foremost proud of his Table of Categories; with it in his hand he said:  “This is the most difficult thing that could ever be undertaken on behalf of metaphysics.”  Let us only understand this “could be”!  He was proud of having discovered a new faculty in man, the faculty of synthetic judgment a priori.  Granting that he deceived himself in this matter; the development and rapid flourishing of German philosophy depended nevertheless on his pride, and on the eager rivalry of the younger generation to discover if possible something—­at all events “new faculties”—­of which to be still prouder!—­But let us reflect for a moment—­it is high time to do so.  “How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” Kant asks himself—­and what is really his answer?  “By means of A means (faculty)”—­but unfortunately not in five words, but so circumstantially, imposingly, and with such display of German profundity and verbal flourishes, that one altogether loses sight of the comical niaiserie allemande involved in such an answer.  People were beside themselves with delight over this new faculty, and the jubilation reached its climax when Kant further discovered a moral faculty in man—­for at that time Germans were still moral, not yet dabbling in the “Politics of hard fact.”  Then came the honeymoon of German philosophy.  All the young theologians of the Tubingen institution went immediately into the groves—­all seeking for “faculties.”  And what did they not find—­in that innocent, rich, and still youthful period of the German spirit, to which Romanticism, the malicious fairy, piped and sang, when one could not yet distinguish between “finding” and “inventing”!  Above all a faculty for the “transcendental”; Schelling christened it, intellectual intuition, and thereby gratified the most earnest longings of the naturally pious-inclined