side world, before which you pose as the fountain-heads of all ultimate knowledge? Or, have you not, on the very contrary, disagreed absolutely with each other? And, if you doubt each other, may we not in turn doubt you all? Is it not true that Kant never mastered, and loudly proclaimed he never could master, the doctrine of Spinoza?[1] Did not the philosopher of Königsberg declare the system of Fichte to be utterly untenable? Does not Schopenhauer in turn repudiate Kant? Were not the leading principles of Schopenhauer's own system contained, and in some measure worked out, in Fichte's "Wissenschaftslehre"? And did not the same Schopenhauer, having failed to perceive the similarity (carping critics have been found malicious enough to more than hint that perhaps he herein judged wisely), stigmatize that work, the alleged germ of his own, as a "farrago of absurdities"?[2] Has not J. S. Mill declared it to be characteristic of Hamilton that he seldom or never adhered to any philosophic statement he had adopted, that "an almost incredible multitude of inconsistencies show themselves on comparing different passages of his works with each other," and that his whole system of "intuitional" philosophy is a profound mistake?[3] And is it not equally true that the adherents of the Scotch philosopher seem to have made it plain that his somewhat ruthless English critic never succeeded in understanding him?[4] Furthermore, has it not been averred by one of his most earnest panegyrists that Kant failed himself to grasp the full import of his own doctrines, that the "new light that was lighted for men" could not illumine his own ideas sufficiently to grasp their total meaning and anticipate the terms of their ultimate evolution?[5] Finally, has not Berkeley with equal truth and candor pronounced the condemnation alike of his own work and of all his fellow-craftsmen in the fatal admission, "We metaphysicians have first raised a dust, and then complain we can not see"?[6]
To the non-metaphysical mind it would indeed appear that the bootless speculations of the pure transcendentalist were calculated on the one hand to dishearten wayfarers on the road to truth by blocking the route with unintelligible mysticism, and on the other to postpone the discovery of a share of ligature's secrets by diverting any available mental power into a wrong channel.[7] How could aught but
- ↑ Kant's "Prolegomena," translated by Bax, p. xxxv.
- ↑ E. B. Bax, ibid., p. 101.
- ↑ J. S. Mill, "Autobiography," pp. 275, 276, third edition, 1874.
- ↑ Maudsley, "Journal of Mental Science," vol. xi, p. 551.
- ↑ E. B. Bax, ibid., preface, p. 3.
- ↑ "Human Knowledge," vol. i, p. 74.
- ↑ So far from its being desirable that that rare form of gift or "acquired mental dexterity," as the introspective faculty is affirmed to be by Sir William Hamilton, should be vouchsafed to cultured mankind at large, the endowment may, without probable ultimate loss to real knowledge, be left in the grasp of the limited class for which its possession is claimed.
