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220 THE WILL IN NATURE.
satisfactory proof possible of its own truth and accuracy.
Compared with such a confirmation as this, which may, in
fact, be looked upon as equivalent to proving a sum in
arithmetic, the regard or disregard of a given period of
time loses all importance, especially when we consider what
has been the subject of interest meanwhile and find it to
be the sort of philosophy we have been treated to since
Kant. The eyes of the public are gradually opening to
the mystification by which it has been duped for the last
forty years under the name of philosophy, and this will be
more and more the case. The day of reckoning is at hand,
when it will see whether all this endless scribbling and
quibbling since Kant has brought to light a single truth of
any kind. I may thus be dispensed from the obligation of
entering here into subjects so unworthy ;
the more so, as I
can accomplish my purpose more briefly and agreeably by
narrating the following anecdote. During the carnival,
Dante having lost himself in a crowd of masks, the Duke
of Medici ordered him to be sought for. Those coin-
missioned to look for him, being doubtful whether they
would be able to find him, as he was himself masked, the
Duke gave them a question to put to every mask they
might
meet who resembled Dante. It was this: "Who
knows what is good ?
"
After receiving several foolish
answers, they finally met with a mask who replied :
" He
that knows what is bad," by which Dante was immediately
recognised. "What is meant by this here is, that I have
seen no reason to be disheartened on account of the want
of sympathy of my contemporaries, since I had at the same
time before my eyes the objects of their sympathy. What
those authors were, posterity will see by their works ; what
the contemporaries were, will be seen by the reception they
gave to those works. My doctrine lays no claim whatever
" El Criticon,"
1 Baltazar Gracian,
responsibility
for the anachronism.
iii. 90,
to whom I leave the