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

many others. Such an expression is all very well foi priests, but iu the learned world it must at once be shown the door: it can go to England and take up its abode at Oxford. It is a thoroughly established fact that Buddhism, the religion which numbers more followers than any other on earth, contains absolutely no theism, indeed rejects it.

As regards Plato, it is my opinion that he owes to the Jews the theism with which he is periodically seized. On this account Numenius (according to Clem. Alex., Strom., i. c. 22, Euseb. prctp. evajig., xiii. 12, and Suidas under Numenius) called him the Moses grcecisans : Ti yap eari ILXarav, rj Mo>o-i/9 arriKi^av \ and he accuses him of having stolen {atroavkfjo-as;) doctrine of God and the creation from the Mosaic writings.

Clemens often repeats that Plato knew made use of Moses, e.g., Strom., i. 25. — v. c 14, § 90, &c. ; Pcedagog., ii. 10, and iii. 11; also in the Cohortc ad gentes, c.

6, where, after he has bitterly censured derided the whole of the Greek philosophers in the ceding chapter because they were not Jews, he besio\ on Plato nothing but praise, and breaks out into part exultation that as Plato had learnt his geometry from the Egyptians, his astronomy from the Babylonians, magic from the Thracians, and much also from the> Assyrians, so he had learnt his theism from the Jews: OiBa gov tou?

StSaoTcaAovs, xav aTTOKptrrrreLv etfeXi}?, . JL\ Bo^av ttjv too 6eov irap avrwv axpeX-qaei tcov Efipauw (^W magistros novi, licet eos celare veils, . . . ilia de Deo senUn/Ai suppeditata tibi est ab Hebrceis). A pathetic see: recognition. But I see a remarkable confirmation of th* matter in what follows. According to Plutarch (in Marm\ and, better, according to Lactantius (i.

3, 19), Pfl thanked Nature that he had been born a human beinj and not a brute, a man and not a woman, a Greek am not a barbarian. Now in Isaac Euchel's " Prayers of tSj Jews," from the Hebrew, second edition, 1799, p. 7, ther is a morning prayer in which God is thanked and prais»;

flp. 99 bliat the worshipper was born a Jew and not a heathen, 1 free man and not a slave, a man and not a woman. Such an historical investigation would have spared Kant in unfortunate necessity in which he now becomes involved, in that he makes these three conceptions spring aecessarily from the nature of reason, and yet explains ;hat they are untenable and unverifiable by the reason, md thus makes the reason itself a sophisticator ; for he says, p. 339; V. 397: "There are sophistications, not of nan, but of pure reason itself, from which even the wisest )annot free himself, and although after much trouble he nay be able to avoid error, yet he never can escape from ihe illusion which unceasingly torments and mocks him." Therefore these Kantian "Ideas of the Keason" might 3e compared to the focus in which the converging relected rays from a concave mirror meet several inches iefore its surface, in consequence of which, by an inevitible process of the understanding, an object presents itself .0 us there which is a thing without reality.

But the name " Idea " is very unfortunately chosen for hese pretended necessary productions of the pure theo- •etical reason, and violently appropriated from Plato, who ised it to denote the eternal forms which, multiplied hrough space and time, become partially visible in the nnumerable individual ileeting things. Plato's "Ideas" *e accordingly throughout perceptible, as indeed the vord which he chose so definitely signifies, for it could inly be adequately translated by means of perceptible or asible things; and Kant has appropriated it to denote hat which lies so far from all possibility of perception hat even abstract thought can only half attain to it. Che word " Idea," which Plato first introduced, has, more- >ver, since then, through two-and-twenty centuries, always etained the significance in which he used it; for not •nly all ancient philosophers, but also all the Scholastics, .nd indeed the Churcli Fathers and the theologians of he Middle Ages, used it only in that Platonic sense, the ioo CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.

sense of the Latin word exemplar, as Suarez expressly mentions in his twenty-fifth Disputation, sect I. That Englishmen and Frenchmen were later induced by the poverty of their languages to misuse this word is bad enough, but not of importance. Kant's misuse of the word idea, by the substitution of a new significance introduced by means of the slender clue of not being object of experience, which it has in common with Plato's ideas, but also in common with every possible chimera, is thus altogether unjustifiable. Now, since the misuse of a few years is not to be considered against the authority of many centuries, I have always used the word in its old, original, Platonic significance.