whole mind, fixing it, analyzing it in the finest or coarsest manner, recomposing it, and again analyzing it, and always with a firm unshaken hand, and with the assurance that it will always remain as he has arranged it. It is, therefore, also clear, that this is not only a higher degree of labor, but an entirely new kind of mental labor, the like of which has never before been known, and that the faculty of working in this manner can be practised and exercised only upon the one object, which exists for it. Hence, all other thinkers, however accomplished and practised, will need time and diligence to gain a firm foothold in this science, and can by no means give a competent judgment upon it after the first or second reading. Is it then, to be supposed, that unpractised and unscientific persons, who have no other culture than that of memory, and who are not even capable of carrying on an objective-scientific argument, should be able to pass a judgment upon any detached proposition of that science, which they may have found in some newspaper or another, at the very first reading, just as if they had merely to say whether they had already heard the same thing somewhere else or not?
At the same time, no study is so easy as the study of this science, as soon as but the very first ray of light concerning its true nature has risen upon students. This science presupposes no elementary knowledge of any kind, but merely ordinary mental culture. It does not weaken the mind, but strengthens and enlivens it. Its progress is altogether connected, and its method very simple and easily comprehended. Each single point of this science, which has been understood, throws a flood of light upon all the others.
The Science of Knowledge, therefore, is not inborn in man, as his five senses are, but can be acquired only through study. It was this I wished to convince you of, my reader, so that, if you have not studied it yet, and have no inclination to study it now, you may at least be careful not to make yourself ridiculous by talking about it; and secondly, so that you may know what to think, when other persons, however highly cultivated otherwise, talk about the Science of Knowledge, without having studied it any more than you have.
The ultimate question of all philosophy is the question of the Absolute. Is there an Universal, a Necessary, an Unconditioned on which the Finite and Particular depend? Though doubtless every truth is this or that truth, has it not in it a something which constitutes it truth independently of its particular elements? Is there a substance, so to speak, in which the relative inheres, a foundation on which it rests, and of which all particulars are the partial representation? In analysing the Related do we not come at last to an Unrelated, the ground on which all the former reposes — itself groundless; and will not every process of explanation lead sooner or later to an inexplicable?
All else in philosophy leads up to this culmination which crowns the synthesis of thought, and according to its holding on this point a philosophic system may be judged. For the fundamental principle of all science is the Platonic axiom: — There can be no science of that which fluctuates or passes away. The Absolute, then, is the true scientific element. The scientific spirit consists in constantly bringing the Absolute into the Relative, and constantly leading up the Relative to the Absolute. Thus all philosophy may be summed up under these three heads: — Rational Psychology, or science of the Absolute as idea, in its relation to reason; Ontology, or science of the Absolute outside of reason, in its relation to existence ; and Logic, or the passage from the first to the last, from idea to being.
It is evident to a superficial observation
