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

us sensible relief and assistance sometimes to think, by whom we feel ourselves borne where we could not have gone alone. Goethe once said to me that if he read a page of Kant he felt as if he entered a brightly lighted room.

Inferior minds are so not merely because they are distorted, and therefore judge falsely, but primarily through the indistinctness of their whole thinking, which may be compared to seeing through a bad telescope when all the outlines appear indistinct and as if obliterated, and the different objects run into each other.

The weak understanding of such minds shrinks froir the demand for distinctness of conceptions, and thereforf they do not themselves make this claim upon it, but pu' up with haziness ; and to satisfy themselves with this the] gladly have recourse to words, especially such as denotx indefinite, very abstract, unusual conceptions which ar hard to explain ; such, for example, as infinite and finite sensible and supersensible, the Idea of being, Ideas c the reason, the absolute, the Idea of the good, th divine, moral freedon, power of spontaneous generatioi the absolute Idea, subject-object, &c.

The like of thes they confidently fling about, imagine they really expres thoughts, and expect every one to be content with then] for the highest summit of wisdom which they can see : to have at command such ready-made words for ever possible question. This immense satisfaction in words thoroughly characteristic of inferior minds.

It depenc simply upon their incapacity for distinct conception whenever these must rise above the most trivial ar simple relations. Hence upon the weakness and indolen of their intellect, and indeed upon the secret consciou ness of this, which in the case of scholars is bound \ with the early learnt and hard necessity of passing thei selves off as thinking beings, to meet which demand all cases they keep such a suitable store of ready-ma words. It must really be amusing to see a professor philosophy of this kind in the chair, who bond Jide delivt 2such a juggle of words destitute of thoughts, quite sincerely, under the delusion that they are really thoughts, and in front of him the students, who just as bond fide, i.e., under the same delusion, listen attentively and take notes, while yet in reality neither the one nor the other goes beyond the words, but rather these words themselves, together with the audible scratching of pens, are the only realities in the whole matter.

This peculiar satisfaction in words has more than anything else to do with the perpetuation of errors.

For, relying on the words and phrases received from his predecessors, each one confidently passes over obscurities and problems, and thus these are propagated through centuries from book to book; and the thinking man, especially in youth, is in doubt whether it may be that he is incapable of understanding it, or that there is really nothing here to understand ; and similarly, whether for others the problem which they all slink past with such comical seriousness by the same path is no problem at all, or whether it is only that they will not see it.

Many truths remain undiscovered simply on this account, that no one has the courage to look the problem in the face and grapple with it. On the contrary, the distinctness of thought and clearness of conceptions peculiar to eminent minds produces the effect that even known truths when brought forward by them gain new light, or at least a new stimulus. If we hear them or read them, it is as if we exchanged a bad telescope for a good one.

Let one only read, for example, in Euler's " Letters to the Princess," his exposition of the fundamental truths of mechanics and optics. Upon this rests the remark of Diderot in the Neveu de Rameau, that only the perfect masters are capable of teaching really well the elements of 1 science ; just because it is only they who really understand the questions, and for them words never take the olace of thoughts.