k very childish and simple. For
all that, it would not be without its value. If they would only go
honestly to work, and say, quite simply, the things they have really
thought, and just as they have thought them, these writers would be
readable and, within their own proper sphere, even instructive.

But instead of that, they try to make the reader believe that their
thoughts have gone much further and deeper than is really the case.
They say what they have to say in long sentences that wind about in a
forced and unnatural way; they coin new words and write prolix periods
which go round and round the thought and wrap it up in a sort of
disguise. They tremble between the two separate aims of communicating
what they want to say and of concealing it. Their object is to dress
it up so that it may look learned or deep, in order to give people
the impression that there is very much more in it than for the moment
meets the eye. They either jot down their thoughts bit by bit, in
short, ambiguous, and paradoxical sentences, which apparently mean
much more than they say,--of this kind of writing Schelling's
treatises on natural philosophy are a splendid instance; or else
they hold forth with a deluge of words and the most intolerable
diffusiveness, as though no end of fuss were necessary to make the
reader understand the deep meaning of their sentences, whereas it is
some quite simple if not actually trivial idea,--examples of which
may be found in plenty in the popular works of Fichte, and the
philosophical manuals of a hundred other miserable dunces not worth
mentioning; or, again, they try to write in some particular style
which they have been pleased to take up and think very grand, a style,
for example, _par excellence_ profound and scientific, where the
reader is tormented to death by the narcotic effect of longspun
periods without a single idea in them,--such as are furnished in
a special measure by those most impudent of all mortals, the
Hegelians[1]; or it may be that it is an intellectual style they have
striven after, where it seems as though their object were to go crazy
altogether; and so on in many other cases. All these endeavors to put
off the _nascetur ridiculus mus_--to avoid showing the funny little
creature that is born after such mighty throes--often make it
difficult to know what it is that they really mean. And then, too,
they write down words, nay, even whole sentences, without attaching
any meaning to the