On the Significance of Science and Art

Book Excerpt: ...it is only necessary for him to display intelligence, --one man in the military service, another in the judicial, another on the violin. There have been many and varied expressions of human wisdom, and these phenomena were known to the men of the nineteenth century. The wisdom of Rousseau and of Lessing, and Spinoza and Bruno, and all the wisdom of antiquity; but no one man's wisdom overrode the crowd. It was impossible to say even this, --that Hegel's success was the result of the symmetry of this theory. There were other equally symmetrical theories, --those of Descartes, Leibnitz, Fichte, Schopenhauer. There was but one reason why this doctrine won for itself, for a season, the belief of the whole world; and this reason was, that the deductions of that philosophy winked at people's weaknesses. These deductions were summed up in this, --that every thing was reasonable, every thing good; and that no one was to blame. When I began my career, Hegelianism was the foundation of every thing. It w