"I may say that the English and French in particular will understand nothing of the development of German philosophy since Kant, until they have penetrated the _Critic of Pure Reason_, for _we Germans always look to that_.... Just as we use the houses, the palaces, the churches, but most of all the towers which rise over every thing to guide us in a large city; so also in contemporary philosophy, amid the labyrinth of its quarrels it is impossible to take a single step with security unless we keep our sight fixed on Kant's _Critic_. Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Herbart made this work the great centre of their operations for attack or defence."[66] [66] Preface of the edition of Leipsic, 1838. 149. I do not mean by this that the German philosophers since Kant have added nothing to the _Critic of Pure Reason_: I have already observed (in the seventh chapter of the first book) that the cause of the greater obscurity which is found in Fichte's words, proceeds from his having gone farther than Kant in his abstraction of all objectiveness both external and internal, placing himself in I know not what pure primitive act, from which he pretends to deduce every thing; in which he differs from the author of the _Critic of Pure Reason_, whose labors did not so absolutely annihilate the objectiveness of the internal world, and therefore his observations are less incomprehensible, and even present here and there some few luminous points: I only wished to show the baneful importance of Kant's works, to place those incautious persons on their guard, who, judging from what they have heard, are inclined to regard him as the great restorer of spiritualism and sound philosophy, when, in reality, he is the founder of the most pernicious schools which the history of the human mind has known, and would be one of the most dangerous writers that ever existed, were it not that the obscurity of his ideas, increased by the obscurity of their expression, renders him intolerable to the immense majority of readers, even of those versed in philosophical studies. CHAPTER XX. CONTRADICTION OF PANTHEISM TO THE PRIMARY FACTS OF THE HUMAN MIND. 150. I do not know how any philosopher who has meditated on the human mind can incline to pantheism. The deeper we go into the _me_ from which it is pretended to deduce such an absurd system, the more we discover the contradiction in which pantheism appears in respect to the primary ideas and facts of our mind. My development of this observation will be brief, for it turns on questions largely examined in their respective places.