wed herself to be won; and
at present every kind of dogma stands with sad and discouraged mien--IF,
indeed, it stands at all! For there are scoffers who maintain that it
has fallen, that all dogma lies on the ground--nay more, that it is at
its last gasp. But to speak seriously, there are good grounds for hoping
that all dogmatizing in philosophy, whatever solemn, whatever conclusive
and decided airs it has assumed, may have been only a noble puerilism
and tyronism; and probably the time is at hand when it will be once
and again understood WHAT has actually sufficed for the basis of such
imposing and absolute philosophical edifices as the dogmatists have
hitherto reared: perhaps some popular superstition of immemorial time
(such as the soul-superstition, which, in the form of subject- and
ego-superstition, has not yet ceased doing mischief): perhaps some
play upon words, a deception on the part of grammar, or an
audacious generalization of very restricted, very personal, very
human--all-too-human facts. The philosophy of the dogmatists, it is to
be hoped, was only a promise for thousands of years afterwards, as was
astrology in still earlier times, in the service of which probably more
labour, gold, acuteness, and patience have been spent than on any
actual science hitherto: we owe to it, and to its "super-terrestrial"
pretensions in Asia and Egypt, the grand style of architecture. It seems
that in order to inscribe themselves upon the heart of humanity with
everlasting claims, all great things have first to wander about the
earth as enormous and awe-inspiring caricatures: dogmatic philosophy has
been a caricature of this kind--for instance, the Vedanta doctrine in
Asia, and Platonism in Europe. Let us not be ungrateful to it, although
it must certainly be confessed that the worst, the most tiresome,
and the most dangerous of errors hitherto has been a dogmatist
error--namely, Plato's invention of Pure Spirit and the Good in Itself.
But now when it has been surmounted, when Europe, rid of this nightmare,
can again draw breath freely and at least enjoy a healthier--sleep,
we, WHOSE DUTY IS WAKEFULNESS ITSELF, are the heirs of all the strength
which the struggle against this error has fostered. It amounted to
the very inversion of truth, and the denial of the PERSPECTIVE--the
fundamental condition--of life, to speak of Spirit and the Good as Plato
spoke of them; indeed one might ask, as a physician: "How did such a
malady