bred boastful mediocrities, who are proclaimed great men. Hamann, however, translated these dialogues; Kant went through the translation, and late in life wished to induce Hamann’s son to publish them because the translation of Platner did not satisfy him (see Kant’s biography by F. W. Schubert, pp. 81 and 165). From every page of David Hume there is more to be learned than from the collected philosophical works of Hegel, Herbart, and Schleiermacher together. The founder of systematic optimism, again, is Leibnitz whose philosophical merit I have no intention of denying although I have never succeeded in thinking myself into the monadology, pre‐established harmony, and _identitas indiscernibilium_. His “_Nouveaux essays sur l’entendement_” are, however, merely an excerpt, with a full yet weak criticism, with a view to correction, of Locke’s work which is justly of world‐wide reputation. He here opposes Locke with just as little success as he opposes Newton in the “_Tentamen de motuum cœlestium causis_,” directed against the system of gravitation. The “Critique of Pure Reason” is specially directed against this Leibnitz‐Wolfian philosophy, and has a polemical, nay, a destructive relation to it, just as it is related to Locke and Hume as a continuation and further construction. That at the present day the professors of philosophy are on all sides engaged in setting Leibnitz, with his juggling, upon his legs again, nay, in glorifying him, and, on the other hand, in depreciating and setting aside Kant as much as possible, has its sufficient reason in the _primum vivere_; the “Critique of Pure Reason” does not admit of one giving out Judaistic mythology as philosophy, nor of one speaking, without ceremony, of the “soul” as a given reality, a well‐known and well‐accredited person, without giving account of how one arrived at this conception, and what justification one has for using it scientifically. But _primum vivere, deinde philosophari_! Down with Kant, _vivat_ our Leibnitz! To return, then, to Leibnitz, I cannot ascribe to the Théodicée, as a methodical and broad unfolding of optimism, any other merit than this, that it gave occasion later for the immortal “_Candide_” of the great Voltaire; whereby certainly Leibnitz’s often‐repeated and lame excuse for the evil of the world, that the bad sometimes brings about the good, received a confirmation which was unexpected by him. Even by the name of his hero Voltaire indicates that it only requires sincerity to recognise the opposite of optimism. Really upon this scene of sin, suffering, and death optimism makes such an extraordinary figure that one would be forced to regard it as irony if one had not a sufficient explanation of its origin in the secret source of it (insincere flattery, with insulting confidence in its success), which, as was mentioned above, is so delightfully disclosed by Hume.