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

p. 262

both the reader and I myself would be ill ; for the most nauseous tediousness hangs over the empty word-juggling of this loathsome philophaster.

That in 'practical philosophy also no wisdom is brought to light from mere abstract conceptions is the one thing to be learnt from the ethical dissertations of the theologian Schleiermacher, with the delivery of which he has wearied the Berlin Academy for a number of years, and which are shortly to appear in a collected form. In them only abstract conceptions, such as duty, virtue, highest good, moral law, &c, are taken as the starting-point, without further introduction than that they commonly occur in ethical systems, and are now treated as given realities. He then discusses these from all sides with great subtilty, but, on the other hand, never makes for the source of these conceptions, for the thing itself, the actual human life, to which alone they are related, from which they ought to be drawn, and with which morality has, properly speaking, to do. On this account these diatribes are just as unfruitful and useless as they are tedious, which is saying a great deaL At all times we find persons, like this theologian, who is too fond of philosophising, famous while they are alive, afterwards soon forgotten. My advice is rather to read those whose fate has been the opposite of this, for time is short and valuable.

Now although, in accordance with all that has been said, wide, abstract conceptions, which can be realised in no perception, must never be the source of knowledge, the starting-point or the proper material of philosophy, yet sometimes particular results of philosophy are such as can only be thought in the abstract, and cannot be proved by any perception. Knowledge of this kind will certainly only be half knowledge ; it will, as it were, only point out the place where what is to be known lies ; but this remains concealed. Therefore we should only be satisfied with such conceptions in the most extreme case, and wher we have reached the limit of the knowledge possible t*p. 263 our faculties. An example of this might perhaps be the conception of a being out of time ; such as the proposition : the indestructibility of our true being by death is not a continued existence of it. "With conceptions of this sort the firm ground which supports our whole knowledge, the perceptible, seems to waver. Therefore philosophy may certainly at times, and in case of necessity, extend to such knowledge, but it must never begin with it.

The working with wide abstractions, which is condemned above, to the entire neglect of the perceptive knowledge from which they are drawn, and which is [therefore their permanent and natural controller, was at (all times the principal source of the errors of dogmatic [philosophy.

A science constructed from the mere comparison of conceptions, that is, from general principles, could only be certain if all its principles were synthetical a priori, as is the case in mathematics : for only such admit of no exceptions. If, on the other hand, the principles have any empirical content, we must keep this constantly at hand, to control the general principles.

For no truths which are in any way drawn from experience are ever unconditionally true. They have therefore only an approximately universal validity ; for here there is no rule without an exception. If now I link these principles together by means of the intersection of their conceptspheres, one conception might very easily touch the other precisely where the exception lies.

But if this happens even only once in the course of a long train of reasoning, the whole structure is loosed from its foundation and moves in the air. If, for example, I say, " The ruminants have no front incisors," and apply this and what follows from it to the camel, it all becomes false, for it only holds good of horned ruminants. What Kant calls das Vernilnfteln, mere abstract reasoning, and so often condemns, is just of this sort.

For it consists simply in subsuming conceptions under conceptions, without reference to their origin, and without proof of the correctness and exclusive264 FIRST BOOK. CHAPTER VII.