with its _molécules de lumière_, and in general with their fixed idea of reducing everything in nature to mere mechanical effects. Lastly, the great individual diversity of intelligence we are speaking about shows itself excellently in the _degrees of the clearness of understanding_, and accordingly in the distinctness of _the whole thinking_. To one man that is to understand which to another is only in some degree to observe; the one is already done and at the goal while the other is only at the beginning; to the one that is the solution which to the other is only the problem. This depends on the _quality of thought_ and knowledge, which was already referred to above. As in rooms the degree of light varies, so does it in minds. We can detect this _quality of the whole thought_ as soon as we have read only a few pages of an author. For in doing so we have been obliged to understand both with his understanding and in his sense; and therefore before we know all that he has thought we see already how he thinks, what is the _formal_ nature, the _texture_ of his thinking, which remains the same in everything about which he thinks, and whose expression is the train of thought and the style. In this we feel at once the pace, the flexibleness and lightness, even indeed the soaring power of his mind; or, on the contrary, its dulness, formality, lameness and leaden quality. For, as language is the expression of the mind of a nation, style is the more immediate expression of the mind of an author than even his physiognomy. We throw a book aside when we observe that in it we enter an obscurer region than our own, unless we have to learn from it mere facts, not thoughts. Apart from mere facts, only that author will afford us profit whose understanding is keener and clearer than our own, who forwards our thinking instead of hindering it, like the dull mind that will force us to keep pace with the toad-like course of its thought; thus that author with whose mind it gives us sensible relief and assistance sometimes to think, by whom we feel ourselves borne where we could not have gone alone. Goethe once said to me that if he read a page of Kant he felt as if he entered a brightly lighted room. Inferior minds are so not merely because they are distorted, and therefore judge falsely, but primarily through the _indistinctness_ of their whole thinking, which may be compared to seeing through a bad telescope, when all the outlines appear indistinct and as if obliterated, and the different objects run into each other. The weak understanding of such minds shrinks from the demand for distinctness of conceptions, and therefore they do not themselves make this claim upon it, but put up with haziness; and to satisfy themselves with this they gladly have recourse to _words_, especially such as denote indefinite, very abstract, unusual conceptions which are hard to explain; such, for example, as infinite and finite,