On the Significance of Science and Art

Not long ago, their reigned in the learned, cultivated world, a moral philosophy, according to which it appeared that everything which exists is reasonable; that there is no such thing as evil or good; and that it is unnecessary for man to war against evil, but that 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. . . .