The World as Will and Idea, Vol. I — Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. Haldane & Kemp

If the doctrine of Kant had ever been properly understood and grasped, and since Kant’s time that of Plato, if men had truly and earnestly reflected on the inner meaning and content of the teaching of these two great masters, instead of involving themselves in the "technicalities of the one and writing parodies of the style of the other, they could not have failed to discern long ago to what an extent these two great philosophers agree, and that the true meaning, the aim _of . bo^ systems, is the same. Not oixly would they have retrained from constantly comparing Plato to Leibnitz, on whom his spirit certainly did not rest, or indeed to a

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well-known gentleman who is still alive, ^ as if they wanted to mock the manes of the great thinker of the past ; but they would have advanced much farther in general, or rather they would not have fallen so disgracefully far behind as they have in the last forty years.

They would not have let themselves be led by the nose, to-day by one vain boaster and to-morrow by another, nor would they have opened the nineteenth century, which promised so much in Germany, with the philosophical farces that were performed over the grave of Kant (as the ancients sometimes did at the funeral obsequies of their dead), and which deservedly called forth the derision of other nations, for such things least become the earnest and strait-laced German.

But so small is the chosen public of true philosophers, that even students who understand are but scantily brought them by the centuries — Evai Sri papd'i)KO<popoi fiev rroWoi, ^uKyoi Be ye rravpoi {Thyrsigeri quidem multi, Bacchi vero pauci).

'H arigta <j)i\ocro(f>uf Bia Taura TTpoarrerTrcoKev, on ov kut a^iav avTri<t arTTOvrai' ov yap poOovi eSei drrTeaOai, aXka yvri<nov‘i {Earn ob rem philosopMa in in/amiam incidit, quod non pro diynitate ipsam attingunt : neque enim a spuriis, sed a legitimis erat attrectanda). — Plato.

Men followed the words, — such words as “a priori ideas,” “ forms of perception and thought existing in consciousness independently of experience,” “ f undamental conceptions of the pure understanding,” &c., &c., — and asked whether I’lato’s Ideas, which were also original conceptions, and besides this were supposed to be reminiscences of a perception before life of the truly real things, were in some way the same as Kant’s forms of perception and thought, which lie a priori in our consciousness. On account of some slight resemblance in the expression of these two entirely different doctrines, the Kantian doctrine of the forms which limit the knowledge of the individual to the phenomenon, and the Platonic doctrine

» F. H. Jncobi.

426 THE WORLD ^5 IDEA. BK. iil of Ideas, the knowledge of which these very forms expressly deny, these so far diametrically opposed doctrines were carefully compared, and men deliberated and disputed as to whether they were identical, found at last that they were not the same, and concluded that Plato's doctrine of Ideas and Kant’s “ Critique of Keason ” had nothing in common. But enough of this.^