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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 207
I see certain proofs of this ignorance, and must here sup
port my assertion by a few examples. First let me present
a very singular specimen, though it is now some years old.
In Professor Michelet s
"
Anthropology and "
Psychology
(p. 444), he states Kant s Categorical Imperative
words :
"
thou must, for thou canst
in the
following
"
(du sollst,
denn du Jcannsf). This cannot be a lapsus calami, for he
"
again states it in the same words in his History of the
Development of Modern German Philosophy" (p. 38), *
published three years later. Letting alone the fact that he
appears to have studied Kantian philosophy in Schiller s
epigrams, he has thus turned the thing upside down, and
expressed exactly the opposite of Kant s argument ; evidently
without having the slightest inkling of what Kant meant
by that postulate of Freedom on the basis of his Categorical
Imperative. None of Professor Michelet s colleagues, to
my knowledge, have pointed out this veniam damns, petimusque
"
mistake, but hanc
vicissim" Another more recent
instance. The above mentioned reviewer of Oersted s book
(see note 1 (c), p. 202), to whose title the present treatise un
fortunately had to stand godfather, comes in that work on
"
"
the sentence that bodies are spaces filled with force
(krafterfiilUe Edume). This is new to him; so without
the faintest suspicion that he has to do with a far-famed
Kantian dogma, and taking this for a paradoxical opinion
of Oersted s, he attacks it and argues against it bravely,
persistently and repeatedly in both his reviews, which ap
peared at an interval of three years from one another,
using arguments
"
like these :
something substantial, Matter ;
"
later :
Force cannot fill Space without
"
then again three years
Force in Space does not yet constitute any thing.
1 Another instance of Michelet s ignorance is to be frund io Schopen
hauer s posthumous writings, see
" Aus Arthur Schopenhauer s hand-
schriftlichem Nachlass," Leipzig, A. Brockhaus, 1864, p. 327. [Editor s
note.]