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134 THE FOURFOLD BOOT. [CHAP. V.
Hegel, without more ado, called his theory of the universe
and of all things "Die Idee," and in this of course all
thought that they had something to lay hold of. Still, if
we inquire into the nature of these ideas for which Reason is
pronounced to be the faculty, without letting ourselves be
put out of countenance, the explanation usually given is an
empty, high-flown, confused verbiage, in set periods of such
before he
length, that if the reader does not fall asleep
has half read it, he will find himself bewildered rather than
enlightened at the end ; nay, he may even have a suspicion
that these ideas are very like chimaeras. Meanwhile, should
anyone show a desire to know more about this sort of ideas,
he will have all kinds of things served up to him. Now it
will be the chief subjects of the theses of Scholasticism
I allude here to the representations of God, of an immortal
Soul, of a real, objectively existent World and its laws
which Kant himself has unfortunately called Ideas of
Reason, erroneously and unjustifiably, as I have shown in
my Critique of his philosophy, yet merely with a view to
proving the utter impossibility of demonstrating them and
their want of all theoretical authority. Then again it will
be, as a variation, only God, Freedom, and Immortality ; at
other times it will be the Absolute, whose acquaintance we
have already made in 20, as the Cosmological Proof, forced
to travel incognito ;
or the Infinite as opposed to the Finite ;
for, on the whole, the German reader is disposed to con
tent himself with such empty talk as this, without perceiving
that the only clear thought he can get out of it is, tliat
which has an end and that which has none. The
G-ood, the True, and the Beautiful, moreover, stand high
in favour with the sentimental and tender-hearted as
pretended ideas, though they are really only three very wide
and abstract conceptions, because they are extracted from
a multitude of things and relations ;
wherefore, like many
other such dbstracta, they are exceedingly empty. As regards