COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



sible for his aberrations, has been acknowledged 

 by later German critics. The testimony of 

 Biichner, which on most vital points of philo- 

 sophy I should be very slow to cite, is quite 

 admissible here : " The playing with high- 

 sounding but thoroughly empty words has been 

 the fatal vice of German philosophy. . . . We 

 have often with justice been advised to trans- 

 late our philosophic treatises into a foreign 

 tongue, in order to rid them of their unintelligi- 

 ble verbiage. But assuredly few of them could 

 bear the test." A similar complaint, with es- 

 pecial reference to Hegel, has been made by 

 Schopenhauer.^ 



Again, let us not fail to observe that in char- 

 acterizing HegeFs logic of contradictories as re- 

 pugnant to common-sense, we urge an objection 

 which, however valid it may seem to us, would 

 to one in Hegel's position have no weight what- 

 ever. For Hegel's fundamental postulate is that 

 deductions from a priori premises furnished by 

 pure reason have an incomparably higher valid- 



^ Schopenhauer, indeed, quite loses his patience over He- 

 gel's verbal legerdemain, and calls him a ** geistlosen, unwis- 

 senden, Unsinn schmierenden, die Kopfe durch beispiellos 

 hohlen Wortkram von Grund aus und auf immer desorgani- 

 sirenden Philosoph aster." (!) I quote from memory, and 

 cannot now recover the passage where this outbreak occurs. 

 [The passage occurs in Schopenhauer's essay on the Satx vom 

 Grundey 4tes Kapitel, § 20 (Grisebach's Edition, Bd. iii. 

 p. 53). Fiske has quoted it quite accurately.] 

 182 



