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XV111 THE AUTHOR S PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
wherever he had advanced what was incorrect or super
fluous, or had even left out the best part, I have been
obliged to interrupt the thread of his discourse. And
this has happened often enough ; so often, indeed, that
some of my readers may perhaps think they hear an old
man reading a young man s book aloud, while he frequently
lets it drop, in order to indulge in digressions of his own
on the same subject.
It is easy to see that a work thus corrected after so long
an interval, could never acquire the unity and rounded
completeness which only belong to such as are written in
one breath. So great a difference will be found even in style
and expression, that no reader of any tact can ever be in
doubt whether it be the older or younger man who is speak
ing. For the contrast is indeed striking between the mild,
unassuming tone in which the youth who is still simple
enough to believe quite seriously that for all whose pur
suit is philosophy, truth, and truth alone, can have im
portance, and therefore that whoever promotes truth is
sure of a welcome from them propounds his arguments
with confidence, and the firm, but also at times somewhat
harsh voice of the old man, who in course of time has
necessarily discovered the true character and real aims of
the noble company of mercenary time-servers into which
he has fallen. Nay, the just reader will hardly find fault
with him should he occasionally give free vent to his
indignation; since we see what comes of it when people
who profess to have truth for their sole aim, are always
occupied in studying the purposes of their powerful
superiors, and when the e quovis ligno fit Mercurius is
extended even to the greatest philosophers, and a clumsy
charlatan, like Hegel, is calmly classed among them ?
Verily German Philosophy stands before us loaded with
contempt, the laughing-stock of other nations, expelled
from all honest science like the prostitute who sells her-