reason in the presence of claims put forth by others to a logical authority and a spiritual supremacy which they are far from possessing.
A reader indoctrinated in the German schools is, therefore, free not to read further. My object is neither to repeat his familiar arguments in their usual form, nor to refute them; my object is to describe them intelligibly and to judge them from the point of view of the layman, and in his interests. For those who wish to study German philosophy, the original authors are at hand: all I would give here is the aroma of German philosophy that has reached my nostrils. If the reader has smelt something of the kind, so much the better: we shall then understand each other. The function of history or of criticism is not passively to reproduce its subject-matter. One real world, with one stout corpus of German philosophy, is enough. Reflection and description are things superadded, things which ought to be more winged and more selective than what they play upon. They are echoes of reality in the sphere of art, sketches which may achieve all the truth appropriate to them without belying their creative limitations: for their essence is to be intellectual symbols, at once indicative and original.
Egotism—subjectivity in thought and wilfulness in morals—which is the soul of German philosophy,
