open air all true perspective gets lost, extremes and oddities count
as much as sanities, and command the same attention; and if by chance
any one writes popularly and about results only, with his mind
directly focussed on the subject, it is reckoned _oberflächliches
zeug_ and _ganz unwissenschaftlich_. Professor Paulsen has recently
written some feeling lines about this over-professionalism, from
the reign of which in Germany his own writings, which sin by being
'literary,' have suffered loss of credit. Philosophy, he says, has
long assumed in Germany the character of being an esoteric and
occult science. There is a genuine fear of popularity. Simplicity of
statement is deemed synonymous with hollowness and shallowness. He
recalls an old professor saying to him once: 'Yes, we philosophers,
whenever we wish, can go so far that in a couple of sentences we can
put ourselves where nobody can follow us.' The professor said this
with conscious pride, but he ought to have been ashamed of it. Great
as technique is, results are greater. To teach philosophy so that the
pupils' interest in technique exceeds that in results is surely a
vicious aberration. It is bad form, not good form, in a discipline
of such universal human interest. Moreover, technique for technique,
doesn't David Hume's technique set, after all, the kind of pattern
most difficult to follow? Isn't it the most admirable? The english
mind, thank heaven, and the french mind, are still kept, by their
aversion to crude technique and barbarism, closer to truth's natural
probabilities. Their literatures show fewer obvious falsities and
monstrosities than that of Germany. Think of the german literature of
aesthetics, with the preposterousness of such an unaesthetic personage
as Immanuel Kant enthroned in its centre! Think of german books on
_religions-philosophie_, with the heart's battles translated into
conceptual jargon and made dialectic. The most persistent setter of
questions, feeler of objections, insister on satisfactions, is the