retorts or even stuffed a monkey, they do not esteem them worthy of further acquaintance. They prefer calmly to toss out of the window the intellectual labour of two thousand years and treat the public to a philosophy concocted out of their own rich mental resources, on the basis of the catechism on the one hand, and on that of crucibles and retorts or the catalogue of monkeys on the other. They ought to be told in plain language that they are ignoramuses, who have much to learn before they can be allowed to have any voice in the matter. Everyone, in fact, who dogmatizes at random, with the _naïve_ realism of a child on such arguments as God, the soul, the world's origin, atoms, &c. &c. &c., as if the Critique of Pure Reason had been written in the moon and no copy had found its way to our planet--is simply one of the vulgar. Send him into the servants' hall, where his wisdom will best find a market.[168] [166] And this infatuation has reached such a point, that people seriously imagine themselves to have found the key to the mystery of the essence and existence of this wonderful and mysterious world in wretched _chemical affinities_! Compared with this illusion of our physiological chemists, that of the alchymists who sought after the philosopher's stone, and only hoped to find out the secret of making gold, was indeed a mere trifle. [Add. to 3rd ed.] [167] "_Aut catechismus, aut materialismus_," is their watchword. [Add. to 3rd ed.] [168] There too he will meet with people who fling about words of foreign origin, which they have caught up without understanding them, just as readily as he does himself, when he talks about "_Idealism_" without knowing what it means, mostly therefore using the word instead of Spiritualism (which being Realism, is the opposite to Idealism). Hundreds of examples of this kind besides other _quid pro quos_ are to be found in books, and critical periodicals. [Add. to 3rd ed.]