PARTISAN REVIEW
acquired the transparent quality of an apparition. There is nothing
substantial; everything that seems to exist consists only of mirages
created according to laws, with which our spirit, God knows for what
purpose, peoples the void. For a hundred years this doctrine was
dominant and deeply changed the consciousness of man. And now,
it haS come to its end; somehow, imperceptibly, it has lost its force,
faded and given up the ghost; philosophers were emboldened to rise
in defense of the ancient naive experience, the external world has
again been restored to its undeniable reality, and of Kant's dazzling
discovery only a modest residue has been salvaged- the truth that the
formal categories of our cognition, the categories of time, space, and
causality are not real but ideal, are characters not of the world but
of consciousness, and are superimposed by the latter on experience, as
a network of lines is superimposed on a map.
Now the mystification of one hundred years has passed-but
what terrible traces it has left! The nightmare of unreality still enve–
lops reason with the cobweb of insanity. Man returns to the sensa–
tion of real being like someone convalescing after a grave disease,
with the morbid and disquieting feeling that everything he perceives
may be a dream. Thus abstract reason in the laboratories of science
produces knowledge and systems, infallible for it, but alien to the
spirit, and when such a truth in the course of time- this
is
inevitable
-cracks along its seams and collapses, we ask ourselves with anguish:
Why did it for so many years swaddle men's minds and impede the
freedom of their movement? Just as the objects sold in shops tempt us
with their pleasant appearance and promise of comfort, so ideas and
knowledge tempt us with an idle temptation, and our spirit became
just as overloaded with them as our houses are with objects. Ideas
and knowledge are fruitful for me if they are naturally born in me;
but acquired from outside, of no natural need, they are like the
collars, umbrellas, galoshes, and watches that the half-naked native in
the African jungle barters from the European. And so I say: I am
bored by the abundance of manufactured objects in my house, but
the accumulated acquisitions of my spirit weigh upon me infinitely
more. I would gladly give away all knowledge and all the thoughts I
have acquired from books, for the joy of discovering for myself,
personally, and from my own experience, a single piece of knowledge,
fresh as a summer morning, primordial, simple.
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