Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 by Various
page 90 of 330 (27%)
page 90 of 330 (27%)
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very comprehensive and complex, but also, (to appearance at least,) in
many points, a very contrary and contradictory creature, see that you take the _whole_ man along with you into your metaphysical chamber; for if there be one paper that has a bearing in the case amissing out of your green bag, (which has happened only too often,) the evidence will be imperfect, and the sentence false or partial--shake your wig as you please. Remember, that though you may be a very subtle logician, the soul of man is not all made up of logic; remember that reason, (_Vernunft_,) the purest that Kant ever criticized withal, is not the proper vital soul in man; is not the creative and productive faculty in intellect at all, but is merely the tool of that which, in philosophers no less than in poets, is the proper inventive power, IMAGINATION, as Wordsworth phrases it: Schlegel's word is _fantasie_. Remember that in more cases than academic dignities may be willing to admit, the heart (where a man has one) is the only safe guide, the only legitimate ruler of the head; and that a mere metaphysician, and solitary speculator, however properly trimmed, "One to whose smooth-rubb'd soul can cling Nor form nor feeling, great nor small; A reasoning, self-sufficing thing, An intellectual all-in-all," may write very famous books, profound even to unintelligibility, but can never be a philosopher. Therefore reject Hegel, "that merely thinking, on a barren heath speculating, self-sufficient, self-satisfied little EGO;"[E] and consider Kant as weighed in the balance and found wanting on his own showing: for if that critical portal of pure reason had indeed been sufficient, as it gave itself out to be, for all the purposes of a human philosophy, what need was there of the "practical back-door" which, at the |
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