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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 205
when lie hath told his tale, he will say, What is the
"
For that diamond in Kant s crown, Transcen
matter?
dental ^Esthetic, never has existed for these gentlemen
it is tacitly set aside, as non-avenue. I wonder what they
think Nature means by producing the rarest of all her
works, a great mind, one among so many hundreds of mil
lions, if the worshipful company of numskulls are to be
able at their pleasure and by their mere counter-assertion
to annul the weightiest doctrines emanating from that
mind, let alone to treat them with disregard and do as if
they did not exist.
But this degenerate, barbarous state of philosophy which,
in the present day, emboldens every tyro to hold forth at
random upon subjects that have puzzled the greatest
minds, is precisely a consequence still remaining of the
impunity with which thanks to the connivance of our pro
fessors of philosophy that audacious scribbler, Hegel, has
been allowed to flood the market with his monstrous
vagaries and so to pass for the greatest of all philosophers
for the last thirty years in Germany. Every one of course
now thinks himself entitled to serve up confidently any
thing that may happen to come into his sparrow s
brain.
Therefore, as I have said, the gentlemen of the philo
sophical trade are anxious before all things to obliterate
Kant s philosophy, in order to be able to return to the
muddy canal of the old dogmatism and to talk at random
to their heart s content upon the favourite subjects which
are specially recommended to them : just as if nothing had
happened and neither a Kant nor a Critical Philosophy
had ever come into the world. 1
The affected veneration
for, and laudation of, Leibnitz too, which has been showing
itself everywhere for some years, proceed from the same
1 For Kant has disclosed the dreadful truth, that philosophy must h<?
quite a different thing from Jewish mythology. [A.dd to 3rd ed.]