Comparative literature; Degeneration; Europe -- Intellectual life
was kicked and abused, and the same faults were committed with
respect to it which it had perpetrated; the methods of intelligent
criticism were mistaken for the results obtained by them. Because
the encyclopædists, from lack of knowledge and of natural facts,
explained nature falsely and arbitrarily, those who were disappointed
and thirsting for knowledge cried out, that intelligent criticism as
such was a false method, that consistent reasoning led to nothing,
that the conclusions of the ‘Philosophy of Enlightenment’ were just as
unproven and unprovable as those of religion and metaphysics, only less
beautiful, colder, and narrower; and mankind threw itself with fervour
into all the depths of faith and superstition, where certainly the Tree
of Knowledge did not grow, but where beautiful mirages charmed the
eye, and the warm fragrant springs of all the emotions bubbled up.
And more fatal than the error of their philosophy was the false
psychology of the encyclopædists. They believed that the thoughts and
actions of men are determined by reason and the laws of consistency,
and had no inkling that the really impelling force in thought and deed
are the emotions, those disturbances elaborated in the depths of the
internal organs, and the sources of which elude consciousness, but
which suddenly burst into it like a horde of savages, not declaring
whence they come, submitting to no police regulations of a civilized
mind, and imperiously demanding lodgment. All that wide region of
organic needs and hereditary impulses, all that E. von Hartmann calls
the ‘Unconscious,’ lay hidden from the rationalists, who saw nothing
but the narrow circle of the psychic life which is illumined by the
little lamp of consciousness. Fiction which should depict mankind
according to the views of this inadequate psychology would be absurdly
untrue. It had no place for passions and follies. It saw in the world
only logical formulæ on two legs, with powdered heads and embroidered
coats of fashionable cut. The emotional nature took its revenge on this
æsthetic aberration, breaking out in ‘storm and stress,’ and in turn
attaching value only to the unconscious, the inherited impulse, and the
organic appetites, while it neglected entirely reason and will, which
are there none the less.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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