g splendid to the human imagination, nothing even positive and
affirmative to the human understanding--should have been able to found
an interest so broad and deep among thirty-five millions of cultivated
men. The English reader who supposes this interest to have been
confined to academic bowers, or the halls of philosophic societies, is
most inadequately alive to the case. Sects, heresies, schisms, by
hundreds, have arisen out of this philosophy--many thousands of books
have been written by way of teaching it, discussing it, extending it,
opposing it. And yet it is a fact, that all its doctrines are
negative--teaching, in no case, what we _are_, but simply what we are
_not_ to believe--and that all its truths are barren. Such being its
unpopular character, I cannot but imagine that the German people have
received it with so much ardour, from profound incomprehension of its
meaning, and utter blindness to its drift--a solution which may seem
extravagant, but is not so; for, even amongst those who have expressly
commented on this philosophy, not one of the many hundreds whom I have
myself read, but has retracted from every attempt to explain its dark
places. In these dark places lies, indeed, the secret of its
attraction. Were light poured into them, it would be seen that they
are _culs-de-sac_, passages that lead to nothing; but, so long as they
continue dark, it is not known whither they lead, how far, in what
direction, and whether, in fact, they may not issue into paths
connected directly with the positive and the infinite. Were it known
that upon every path a barrier faces you insurmountable to human
steps--like the barriers which fence in the Abyssinian valley of
Rasselas--the popularity of this philosophy would expire at once; for
no popular interest can long be sustained by speculations which, in
every aspect, are known to be essentially negative and essentially
finite. Man's nature has something of infinity within itself, which
requires a corresponding infinity in its objects. We are told, indeed,
by Mr. Bulwer, that the Kantian system has ceased to be of any
authority in Germany--that it is defunct, in fact--and that we have
first begun to import it into England, after its root had withered, or
begun to wither, in its native soil. But Mr. Bulwer is mistaken. The
philosophy has never withered in Germany. It cannot even be said that
its fortunes have retrograded: they have oscillated: accidents of
taste and abilit