Or has this no sting for them?--Well to be sure, if it comes to the worst, '_après moi le déluge_' may be pronounced; but as to '_après moi le mépris_,' that is a more difficult matter. Therefore I fancy they will answer that austere judge as follows: "Ah, dear posterity and history of philosophy! you are quite wrong to take us in earnest; we are not philosophers at all, Heaven forbid! No, we are only professors of philosophy, mere servants of the state, mere philosophers in jest. You might as well drag puppet-knights in pasteboard armour into a real tournament." Then the judge will most likely see how matters stand, erase all their names, and confer upon them the _beneficium perpetui silentii_. [195] Göthe, "Tag und Jahreshefte," 1812. [196] This I wrote in 1836. The "Edinburgh Review" has since however greatly deteriorated, and is no longer its old self. I have even seen clerical time-serving in its pages, written down to the level of the mob. From this digression--to which I had been led away eighteen years ago, by the cant and time-serving I then witnessed, though they were not nearly as flourishing then as they are now--I return to that part of my doctrine which Dr. Brandis has confirmed, though he did not originate it, in order to add a few explanations with which I shall then connect some further corroborations it has since received from Physiology. The three assumptions which are criticised by Kant in his Transcendental Dialectic under the names of Ideas of Reason, and have in consequence since been set aside in theoretical philosophy, had always stood in the way of a deeper insight into Nature, until that great thinker brought about a complete transformation in philosophy. That supposed Idea of Reason, the soul: that metaphysical being, in it whose absolute singleness knowing and willing were knit and blended together to eternal, inseparable unity, was an impediment of this sort for the subject-matter of this chapter. As long as it lasted, no philosophical Physiology was possible: the less so, as its correlate, real, purely passive Matter, had necessarily also to be assumed together with it, as the substance of the body.[197] It was this Idea of Reason, the soul, therefore, that caused the celebrated chemist and physiologist, George Ernest Stahl, at the beginning of the last century to miss the discovery of the truth he so nearly approached and would have quite reached, had he been able to put that which is alone metaphysical, the bare _will_--as yet without intellect--in the place of the _anima rationalis_. Under the influence of this Idea of Reason however, he could not teach anything but that it is this simple, rational soul which builds itself a body, all whose inner organic functions it directs and performs, yet has no knowledge or consciousness of all this, although knowledge is the fundamental destination and, as it were, the substance, of its being. There was something absurd in this doctrine which made it utterly