256 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



side world, before which you pose as the fountain-heads of all ultimate 

 knowledge ? Or, have you not, on the very contrary, disagreed abso- 

 lutely 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 ? * 

 Did not the philosopher of KOnigsberg 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 sys- 

 tem contained, and in some measure worked out, in Fichte's " Wis- 

 senschaftslehre " ? 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), stig- 

 matize that work, the alleged germ of his own, as a " farrago of ab- 

 surdities"?! Has not J. S. Mill declared it to be characteristic of 

 Hamilton that he seldom or never adhered to any philosophic state- 

 ment he had adopted, that " an almost incredible multitude of incon- 

 sistencies show themselves on comparing different passages of his 

 works with each other," and that his whole system of "intuitional" 

 philosophy is a profound mistake ? \ 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 under- 

 standing him ? ** Furthermore, has it not been averred by one of his 

 most earnest panegyrists that Kant failed himself to grasp the full 

 imj^ort 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 ? || Finally, 

 has not Berkeley with equal truth and candor j^ronounced the condem- 

 nation alike of his own work and of all his fellow-craftsmen in the 

 fatal admission, " We metaphysicians have first raised a dust, and 

 then complaiJi loe can not see'''' f ^ 



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 block- 

 ing the route with unintelligible mysticism, and on the other to post- 

 pone the discovery of a share of Nature's secrets by diverting any 

 available mental power into a wrong channel.^ How could aught but 



* Kant's " Prolegomena," translated by Bax, p. xxxv. 

 f E. B. Bax, ibid., p. 101. 



X 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 ulti- 

 mate loss to real knowledge, be left in the grasp of the limited class for which its pos- 

 session is claimed. 



