REVIEWS 525 



another in accordance with his own interests ; and the knowledge thus accu- 

 mulated will be in many ways different from that of the professional. He will 

 be ignorant of much that is included in the ordinary curriculum : but on the other 

 hand he will have accumulated a wide knowledge on many unusual and neglected 

 subjects. His outlook is thus somewhat different : he approaches problems from 

 a new angle, and in conjunction with the work of professionals, a parallax is 

 obtained, often leading to remarkable discoveries. 



Yet every one knows that the average amateur is vastly inferior to the average 

 professional. There are few whose desire for light is so keen as to supply an 

 incentive to labour as great as that which the professional is forced to undergo. 

 Moreover, it happens that those whose desire is thus powerful, voluntarily enter 

 the professional career at an early age. In cases where they are prevented from 

 doing so, they commonly are condemned to some business, which draws upon 

 their time and energy and destroys their value. The number of people who, 

 while avoiding a professional career and training, have yet been able to devote 

 their whole time and energy to scientific pursuits, is very small : but where they 

 have succeeded, the success has often been immense. Chamberlain's book is 

 valuable even from this aspect alone. 



Lord Redesdale, himself likewise an amateur in philosophy, has carried out 

 what must have been the very difficult work of translation with much success. 

 A certain number of criticisms, however, are called for. 



Kant's main creed is translated by Lord Redesdale : "The greatest business 

 of man is to know what a man must be in order to be a man " — a phrase of 

 singular vacancy and fatuity, which is quite unfair to the German original. Lord 

 Redesdale constantly betrays a partiality for sentences which wriggle about like 

 corkscrews— or like spirochetes ! He translates •' Ich zitierte . . . das biblische 

 Wort" as "I alluded to the allusion in the Bible": a very unhappy instance 

 of verbal reduplication. He does not always keep his language on a level with 

 the thoughts expressed : as for instance in the translation of " zusammengestop- 

 pelten Beobachtungen " as " higgledy-piggledy observations." The adjective 

 higgledy-piggledy is scarcely legitimate at all in any serious literature : and it 

 is singularly ill-adapted for conveying the writings of such a philosopher as Kant. 

 A still worse fault of the same kind is the translation of " gerade im rechten 

 Augenblick " as " at the psychological moment." If the language of the nursery 

 is unsuitable for a translation of Kant, still more so is that other language known 

 as journalese. The expression " psychological moment " first came into use during 

 the siege of Paris in 1870, when the Krenz Zeitung published an article touching 

 on " Das psychologische Moment," meaning of course the " psychological mo- 

 mentum " or factor of the situation. The French mistook " Das Moment " for 

 " Der Moment," and assuming it to be a moment of time, ridiculed the supposed 

 absurdity of the German expression. It was doubtless this absurdity which 

 caused the sentence to be so promptly taken up by English journalists — of course 

 in its wrong sense, and without any appreciation of the meaninglessness which 

 so much tickled the French humour. At the present time the great majority 

 of scribblers in England, when they wish to express the idea "at the critical 

 moment," use the phrase " at the psychological moment " ; and it is unfortunate 

 that Lord Redesdale should countenance the expression. The advantage obtained 

 seems to consist in the use of a longer word for a shorter one, a more technical 

 word for a less technical one, and a word less generally understood and less 

 precise in meaning for one that is more precise. The desire to use long words, 

 the meaning of which is only partially understood, is characteristic of most 



