But I return to my argument. By means of an amplification which only needed a little audacity, a _theoretical_ oracle had been added to the _practical_ oracle with which Kant had wrongly endowed Reason. The credit of this invention is no doubt due to F. H. Jacobi, from whom the professional philosophers joyfully and thankfully received the precious gift, as a means to help them out of the straits to which Kant had reduced them. That cool, calm, deliberate Reason, which Kant had criticized so mercilessly, was henceforth degraded to _Understanding_ and known by this name; while Reason was supposed to denote an entirely imaginary, fictitious faculty, admitting us, as it were, to a little window overlooking the superlunar, nay, the supernatural world, through which all those truths are handed to us ready cut and dried, concerning which old-fashioned, honest, reflective Reason had for ages vainly argued and contended. And it is on such a mere product of the imagination, such a completely fictitious Reason as this, that German sham philosophy has been based for the last fifty years; first, as the free construction and projection of the absolute _Ego_ and the emanation from it of the _non-Ego_; then, as the intellectual intuition of absolute identity or indifference, and its evolutions to Nature; or again, as the arising of God out of his dark depths or bottomless pit[140] _à la_ Jakob Böhme; lastly, as the pure, self-thinking, absolute Idea, the scene of the ballet-dance of the self-moving conceptions--still, at the same time, always as immediate apprehension (_Vernehmen_) of the Divine, the supersensuous, the Deity, verity, beauty and as many other "-ties" as may be desired, or even as a mere vague presentiment[141] of all these wonders.--So this is Reason, is it? Oh no, it is simply a farce, of which our professors of philosophy, who are sorely perplexed by Kant's serious critiques, avail themselves in order to pass off the subjects of the established religion of their country somehow or other, _per fas aut nefas_, for the results of philosophy. [140] "_Aus seinem Grund oder Ungrund._" [141] "_Ahnung_ without the _d_." See above, p. 133. (Tr.'s note.)