ty, but _is_, in effect, downright
effrontery for you to think yourself no better than other critics; you
were at liberty to think so whilst no claimant of public notice--as
being so, it is most arrogant in you to be modest. This would be the
criticism applied justly to a man who, in Kant's situation, as the
author of a new system, should use a language of unseasonable modesty
or deprecation. To have spoken boldly of himself was a duty; we could
not tolerate his doing otherwise. But to speak of himself in the
exclusive terms I have described, does certainly seem, and for years
did seem to myself, little short of insanity. Of this I am sure that
no student of Kant, having the passage before him, can have known
heretofore what consistent, what rational interpretation to give it;
and, in candour, he ought to own himself my debtor for the light he
will now receive. Yet, so easy is it to imagine, after a meaning is
once pointed out, and the station given from which it shows itself
_as_ the meaning--so easy, under these circumstances, is it to
imagine that one has, or that one could have, found it for one's
self--that I have little expectation of reaping much gratitude for my
explanation. I say this, not as of much importance one way or the
other in a single case of the kind, but because a general
consideration of this nature has sometimes operated to make me more
indifferent or careless as to the publication of commentaries on
difficult systems, when I had found myself able to throw much light on
the difficulties. The very success with which I should have
accomplished the task--the perfect removal of the obstacles in the
student's path--were the very grounds of my assurance-that the service
would be little valued. For I have found what it was occasionally, in
conversation, to be too luminous--to have explained, for instance, too
clearly a dark place in Ricardo. In such a case, I have known a man of
the very greatest powers, mistake the intellectual effort he had put
forth to apprehend my elucidation, and to meet it half way, for his
own unassisted conquest over the difficulties; and, within an hour or
two after, I have had, perhaps, to stand, as an attack upon myself,
arguments entirely and recently furnished by myself. No case is more
possible: even to apprehend a complex explanation, a man cannot be
passive; he must exert considerable energy of mind; and, in the fresh
consciousness of this energy, it is the most natural mis