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| Note: | Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/egotismingerman00santuoft |
EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY
BY
G. SANTAYANA
LATE PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY
LONDON AND TORONTO
J. M. DENT & SONS LIMITED
NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1916
PREFACE
This book is one of the many that the present war has brought forth,but it is the fruit of a long gestation. During more than twenty years,while I taught philosophy at Harvard College, I had continual occasionto read and discuss German metaphysics. From the beginning it wore inmy eyes a rather questionable shape. Under its obscure and fluctuatingtenets I felt something sinister at work, something at once hollow andaggressive. It seemed a forced method of speculation, producing moreconfusion than it found, and calculated chiefly to enable practicalmaterialists to call themselves idealists and rationalists to remaintheologians. At the same time the fear that its secret might be eludingme, seeing that by blood and tradition I was perhaps handicapped in thematter, spurred me to great and prolonged efforts to understand whatconfronted me so bewilderingly. I wished to be as clear and just aboutit as I could—more clear and just, indeed, than it ever was aboutitself.
For the rest, German philosophy was never my chief interest, and Iwrite frankly as an outsider, with no professorial pretensions; merelyusing my common[Pg 6] reason in the presence of claims put forth by othersto a logical authority and a spiritual supremacy which they are farfrom possessing.
A reader indoctrinated in the German schools is, therefore, free notto read further. My object is neither to repeat his familiar argumentsin their usual form, nor to refute them; my object is to describe themintelligibly and to judge them from the point of view of the layman,and in his interests. For those who wish to study German philosophy,the original authors are at hand: all I would give here is the aroma ofGerman philosophy that has reached my nostrils. If the reader has smeltsomething of the kind, so much the better: we shall then understandeach other. The function of history or of criticism is not passivelyto reproduce its subject-matter. One real world, with one stout corpusof German philosophy, is enough. Reflection and description are thingssuperadded, things which ought to be more winged and more selectivethan what they play upon. They are echoes of reality in the sphereof art, sketches which may achieve all the truth appropriate to themwithout belying their creative limitations: for their essence is to beintellectual symbols, at once indicative and original.
Egotism—subjectivity in thought and wilfulness