Philosophy.--Some critical philosophers have now borrowed from the algebra a mathematical method, without which one cannot for a single minute--not so much think as--write philosophically. The algebraist, by the transposition of mere _letters_, catches truths which no chain of reasoning could ever draw out of the deep. In this the critical philosopher has imitated him, but with greater advantage. As he cleverly mixes together, not letters, but whole _technical words_, there rises from the alliteration of the same a cream of truths which he could hardly have dreamed of. Such philosophers are forbidden, and rightly, like the preachers of Gotha (Goth. Public Ordinances, P. III. p. 16), to use allegories, or any flower of speech, which, as other flowers do for the drawing-hounds, would spoil the scent.--Properly, however, the picturesque style is more definite than the technical word-style, which finally, as all _abstract words are pictures_, is also itself a picturesque style, only one full of pictures that have run out and faded. Jacobi is not obscure in consequence of his _images_, but in consequence of the new _ideas_ which through them he would communicate to us. I have lately been looking over the birth-lists of the learned and teaching republic, and counting up the young little Kants whom the old Kant--otherwise unmarried, like his cousin Newton--has for the last ten Fairs begotten. Demetrius Magnus, who wanted to make a book of authors of the same name, must have been very stupid, if he had undertaken to write in our times, and yet at the same time, though he nevertheless communicated that there had been sixteen Platos, twenty Socrateses, twenty-eight Pythagorases, thirty-two Aristotles, had very sinfully omitted to say that there are now as many philosophers and philosophists as those make when reckoned all together--namely, ninety-six--who could bear the name of Kant,--that is, if they chose to. Such mechanics--thus may I call the magisters, because formerly the mechanics, inversely, were called magisters, and the upper master arch-magister--one should take into account as the best propaganda which bulky books can have. They are, at best, competent to diffuse the system, because they know how to separate from it the incomprehensible, the spiritual, and to extract what is popular and palpable, i. e. the words for readers, who, otherwise simple, nevertheless would not die without a critical philosophy. The most miserable theological and æsthetic stone receives now a Kantian setting in words. Although every new system introduces a certain _one-sidedness_ of view into all heads,--especially as every cold philosopher has so much the more _one-sidedness_, precisely as he has the more _insight_,--still that is no matter; for great bars of truth come forth through the joint digging of the whole thinking-works.[234] Whoever has seen Kant standing on his mountain among his learned fellow-laborers, is reminded with pleasure