derstanding and dissimulation are common among timid nations; this is also the true home of all imitative arts and the higher intelligence, If, starting from such a theory of sympathy as previously proposed, I turn my mind to the theory of a mystical process, just now so popular and sanctified, by means of which pity blends two beings into one, and thus enables the one immediately to understand the other; if I hear in mind that so clever a head us Schopenhauer's delighted in such fanciful and frivolous trash, and, in his tum, transferred this delight to clear and half-clear heads: I feel unbounded astonishment and pity. How great must be our delight in inconceivable nonsense! How closely akin to a madman must be a sane man, when he listens to his secret, intellectual desires ! Why then, really, did Schopenhauer feel so grateful, so deeply indebted to Kant? The following instance throws an mistakable light on this “ why?” Somebody had expressed an opinion as to how the categorical Imperative of Kant might be deprived of its occultness and be made conceivable, At which Schopenhauer burst into the following words: ‘ A conceivable categorical Imperative ! Preposterous idea! Egyptian darkness! Heaven for- bid that it should become conceivable! The very fact that there is something inconceivable, that this misery of understanding and its conceptions is limited, conditional, final, deceptive—this certainty is Kant’s great guilt.” Let us consider, whether anybody, who' from the
11
