The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1: With a Preface and Annotations by James HoggDe Quincey, Thomas
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The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1: With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg
De Quincey, Thomas
English literature
purposes of the intellect in this day, or as capable of yielding even
a sufficient terminology. Let this last fact decide the question of
Kant's vitality. _Qui bene distinguit bene docet._ This is an old
adage. Now, he who imposes new names upon all the acts, the functions,
and the objects of the philosophic understanding, must be presumed to
have distinguished most sharply, and to have ascertained with most
precision, their general relations--_so long as his terminology
continues to be adopted_. This test, applied to Kant, will show that
his spirit yet survives in Germany. Frederic Schlegel, it is true,
twenty years ago, in his lectures upon literature, assures us that
even the disciples of the great philosopher have agreed to abandon his
philosophic nomenclature. But the German philosophic literature, since
that date, tells another tale. Mr. Bulwer is, therefore, wrong; and,
without going to Germany, looking only to France, he will see cause to
revise his sentence. Cousin--the philosophic Cousin, the only great
name in philosophy for modern France--familiar as he is with North
Germany, can hardly be presumed unacquainted with a fact so striking,
if it _were_ a fact, as the extinction of a system once so
triumphantly supreme as that of Kant; and yet Mr. Bulwer, admiring
Cousin as he does, cannot but have noticed his efforts to naturalise
Kant in France. Meantime, if it were even true that transcendentalism
had lost its hold of the public mind in Germany, _prima facie_, this
would prove little more than the fickleness of that public which must
have been wrong in one of the two cases--either when adopting the
system, or when rejecting it. Whatever there may be of truth and value
in the system, will remain unimpeached by such caprices, whether of an
individual or of a great nation; and England would still be in the
right to import the philosophy, however late in the day, if it were
true even (which I doubt greatly) that she _is_ importing it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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