Part 21

39 Cf. “Ueber den Willen in der Natur,” at the end of the section on Comparative Anatomy.

40 Cf. “Ueber den Willen in der Natur,” the section on Comparative Anatomy.

41 Chatin, Sur la Valisneria Spiralis, in the Comptes Rendus de l’Acad. de Sc., No. 13, 1855.

42 Cf. Chaps. xxvi. and xxvii. of the Supplement.

43 Cf. Chap. xxviii. of the Supplement.

44 F. H. Jacobi.

45 See for example, “Immanuel Kant, a Reminiscence, by Fr. Bouterweck,” pg. 49, and Buhle’s “History of Philosophy,” vol. vi. pp. 802-815 and 823.

46 Cf. Chap. xxix. of Supplement.

47 I also recommend the perusal of what Spinoza says in his Ethics (Book II., Prop. 40, Schol. 2, and Book V., Props. 25-38), concerning the cognitio tertii generis, sive intuitiva, in illustration of the kind of knowledge we are considering, and very specially Prop. 29, Schol.; prop. 36, Schol., and Prop. 38, Demonst. et Schol.

48 Cf. Chap. xxx. of the Supplement.

49 This last sentence cannot be understood without some acquaintance with the next book.

50 Cf. Chap. xxxi. of the Supplement.

51 I am all the more delighted and astonished, forty years after I so timidly and hesitatingly advanced this thought, to discover that it has already been expressed by St. Augustine: Arbusta formas suas varias, quibus mundi hujus visibilis structura formosa est, sentiendas sensibus praebent; ut, pro eo quod NOSSE non possunt, quasi INNOTESCERE velle videantur.—De civ. Dei, xi. 27.

52 Cf. Chap. 35 of Supplement.

53 Jakob Böhm in his book, “de Signatura Rerum,” ch. i., § 13-15, says, “There is nothing in nature that does not manifest its internal form externally; for the internal continually labours to manifest itself.... Everything has its language by which to reveal itself.... And this is the language of nature when everything speaks out of its own property, and continually manifests and declares itself, ... for each thing reveals its mother, which thus gives the essence and the will to the form.”

54 The last sentence is the German of the il n’y a que l’esprit qui sente l’esprit, of Helvetius. In the first edition there was no occasion to point this out, but since then the age has become so degraded and ignorant through the stupefying influence of the Hegelian sophistry, that some might quite likely say that an antithesis was intended here between “spirit and nature.” I am therefore obliged to guard myself in express terms against the suspicion of such vulgar sophisms.

55 This digression is worked out more fully in the 36th Chapter of the Supplement.

56 In order to understand this passage it is necessary to have read the whole of the next book.

57 Apparent rari, nantes in gurgite vasto.

58 Cf. Ch. xxxiv. of Supplement.

59 It is scarcely necessary to say that wherever I speak of poets I refer exclusively to that rare phenomenon the great true poet. I mean no one else; least of all that dull insipid tribe, the mediocre poets, rhymsters, and inventors of fables, that flourishes so luxuriantly at the present day in Germany. They ought rather to have the words shouted in their ears unceasingly from all sides—

Mediocribus esse poëtis Non homines, non Dî, non concessere columnæ.

It is worthy of serious consideration what an amount of time—both their own and other people’s—and paper is lost by this swarm of mediocre poets, and how injurious is their influence. For the public always seizes on what is new, and has naturally a greater proneness to what is perverse and dull as akin to itself. Therefore these works of the mediocre poets draw it away and hold it back from the true masterpieces and the education they afford, and thus working in direct antagonism to the benign influence of genius, they ruin taste more and more, and retard the progress of the age. Such poets should therefore be scourged with criticism and satire without indulgence or sympathy till they are induced, for their own good, to apply their muse rather to reading what is good than to writing what is bad. For if the bungling of the incompetent so raised the wrath of the gentle Apollo that he could flay Marsyas, I do not see on what the mediocre poets will base their claim to tolerance.

60 Cf. Ch. xxxviii. of Supplement.

61 Cf. Ch. xxxvii. of the Supplement.

62 Leibnitii epistolæ, collectio Kortholti, ep. 154.

63 Cf. Ch. xxxix. of Supplement.

64 The following remark may assist those for whom it is not too subtle to understand clearly that the individual is only the phenomenon, not the thing in itself. Every individual is, on the one hand, the subject of knowing, i.e., the complemental condition of the possibility of the whole objective world, and, on the other hand, a particular phenomenon of will, the same will which objectifies itself in everything. But this double nature of our being does not rest upon a self-existing unity, otherwise it would be possible for us to be conscious of ourselves in ourselves, and independent of the objects of knowledge and will. Now this is by no means possible, for as soon as we turn into ourselves to make the attempt, and seek for once to know ourselves fully by means of introspective reflection, we are lost in a bottomless void; we find ourselves like the hollow glass globe, from out of which a voice speaks whose cause is not to be found in it, and whereas we desired to comprehend ourselves, we find, with a shudder, nothing but a vanishing spectre.