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The superstition that philosophical idealism pivots around a belief in moral, that is in social ideals, arose with the German non-philosophical Philistine, who commits to memory the few philosophical morsels which he finds in Schiller's poems.
Jena became the home and principal stronghold of Kantianism; while by the beginning of the nineteenth century almost all German chairs belonged to it, and the non-philosophical sciences as well received from it stimulation and guiding ideas. In the camp of the enemy there was no less of activity.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL AND NON-PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCES. We have seen in the preceding chapters that certain of the sciences can scarcely be cultivated successfully in complete separation from philosophy. It has also been indicated in various places that the relation of other sciences to philosophy is not so close.
It may be said: If what is maintained above regarding the possibility of prosecuting scientific researches without having recourse to reflective thought is true, why should the man of science care whether the principles and methods of the non-philosophical sciences are investigated or are merely taken for granted?
Even those philosophies of history which the idealist may for some secret reason be impelled to construct would be superstitious, according to his own principles, if he took them for more than poetic fictions of the historian; so that in the study of history, as in every other study, all the diligence and sober learning which the philosopher may possess are non-philosophical, since they presuppose independent events and material documents.
Von Guericke, Hauksbee, and Gray had noticed that pointed bodies attracted electricity in a peculiar manner, but this demonstration of the "drawing off" of "electrical fire" was original with Franklin. Original also was the theory that he now suggested, which had at least the merit of being thinkable even by non-philosophical minds.
There are many who work in this way, and they succeed in making important contributions to human knowledge. Such sciences as these I call the non-philosophical sciences to distinguish them from the group of sciences I have been discussing at length.
Because the noise of a mill-wheel sends one to sleep, and these pages without paragraphs, these interminable chapters, and this incessant, dialectical clatter, affect me as though I were listening to a word-mill. I end by yawning like any simple non-philosophical mortal in the face of all this heaviness and pedantry. Erudition, and even thought, are not everything.
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