case for too long a time. Formerly a man wanted to attain the sum total of knowledge during this short period, and according to this general desire people valued the methods of knowledge. The minor individual questions and experiments were considered contemptible; people wanted the shortest cut, believing that since everything in the world seemed adapted to man, even the acquirement of knowledge was regulated in conformity with the limits of human life. To solve everything with one blow, with one word—this was the secret wish. The task was pictured in the metaphor of the Gordian knot or the egg of Columbus ; no one doubted but that it was possible to reach the goal, even of knowledge, in the manner of Alexander or Columbus, and to satisfy all questions by one answer, “There is a mystery to be solved,” appeared to be the goal of life in the eyes of the philosopher; first of all the mystery had to be discovered and the problem of the world to be compressed into the simplest enigmatical form. The unbounded ambition and delight of being the “unraveller of the world” filled the dreams of the thinker, nothing seemed to him worth any trouble but the means of bringing everything to a satisfactory conclusion. Hence philosophy was a kind of last struggle for the tyrannical sway of the intellect. The fact that such a sway was reserved for some very happy, noble, ingenious, bold, powerful person—a peerless one—was doubted by nobody, and several, at last even Schopenhauer, fancied them selves to be this one peerless person. Whence it follows
