Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/559

in himself, or seeing, does not choose or is unable to amend. "The philosophers of Germany," says Schelling, "have been for so long in the habit of philosophising merely among themselves, that by degrees their thoughts and language have become further and further removed, even in Germany, from the understanding of general readers; and at length the degree of this remoteness from common intelligibility has come almost to be regarded as the measure of philosophic proficiency. Examples of this we hardly require to adduce. As families who abandon the intercourse of their fellow-men acquire, in addition to other disagreeable peculiarities, certain peculiar modes of expression intelligible only to themselves; so have the German philosophers made themselves remarkable for forms of thought and expression which are unintelligible to all the world besides. The fact of their having been repeatedly unsuccessful in their attempts to spread the knowledge of the Kantian philosophy beyond Germany—though, indeed, it compelled them to abandon the hope of making themselves understood by the natives of other countries—yet it never led them to conclude that there was anything wrong either with their philosophy itself, or with their method of communicating it. On the contrary, the oftener and the more signally they failed in their endeavours to disseminate their highly cherished opinions, the stronger did their conviction become that philosophy was something which existed for themselves alone—not considering that to be