worth in himself in order to recognise it and believe in it willingly and
freely in others. On this rests the necessity of modesty in all merit, and
the disproportionately loud praise of this virtue, which alone of all its
sisters is always included in the eulogy of every one who ventures to
praise any distinguished man, in order to appease and quiet the wrath of
the unworthy. What then is modesty but hypocritical humility, by means of
which, in a world swelling with base envy, a man seeks to obtain pardon
for excellences and merits from those who have none? For whoever
attributes to himself no merits, because he actually has none, is not
modest but merely honest.
The _Idea_ is the unity that falls into multiplicity on account of the
temporal and spatial form of our intuitive apprehension; the _concept_, on
the contrary, is the unity reconstructed out of multiplicity by the
abstraction of our reason; the latter may be defined as _unitas post rem_,
the former as _unitas ante rem_. Finally, we may express the distinction
between the Idea and the concept, by a comparison, thus: the _concept_ is
like a dead receptacle, in which, whatever has been put, actually lies
side by side, but out of which no more can be taken (by analytical
judgment) than was put in (by synthetical reflection); the (Platonic)
_Idea_, on the other hand, develops, in him who has comprehended it, ideas
which are new as regards the concept of the same name; it resembles a
living organism, developing itself and possessed of the power of
reproduction, which brings forth what was not put into it.