| Whatever may be the original source of a cognition, it is, in relation to the person who possesses it, merely historical, if he knows only what has been given him from another quarter, whether that knowledge was communicated by direct experience or by instruction. |
| Thus the Person who has learned a system of philosophy--say the Wolfian--although he has a perfect knowledge of all the principles, definitions, and arguments in that philosophy, as well as of the divisions that have been made of the system, possesses really no more than an historical knowledge of the Wolfian system; he knows only what has been told him, his judgements are only those which he has received from his teachers. |
| Dispute the validity of a definition, and he is completely at a loss to find another. |
| He has formed his mind on another's; but the imitative faculty is not the productive. |
| His knowledge has not been drawn from reason; and although, objectively considered, it is rational knowledge, subjectively, it is merely historical. |
| He has learned this or that philosophy and is merely a plaster cast of a living man. |
| Rational cognitions which are objective, that is, which have their source in reason, can be so termed from a subjective point of view, only when they have been drawn by the individual himself from the sources of reason, that is, from principles; and it is in this way alone that criticism, or even the rejection of what has been already learned, can spring up in the mind. |
| All rational cognition is, again, based either on conceptions, or on the construction of conceptions. |
| The former is termed philosophical, the latter mathematical. |
| I have already shown the essential difference of these two methods of cognition in the first chapter. |
| A cognition may be objectively philosophical and subjectively historical--as is the case with the majority of scholars and those who cannot look beyond the limits of their system, and who remain in a state of pupilage all their lives. |
| But it is remarkable that mathematical knowledge, when committed to memory, is valid, from the subjective point of view, as rational knowledge also, and that the same distinction cannot be drawn here as in the case of philosophical cognition. |
| The reason is that the only way of arriving at this knowledge is through the essential principles of reason, and thus it is always certain and indisputable; because reason is employed in concreto--but at the same time a priori--that is, in pure and, therefore, infallible intuition; and thus all causes of illusion and error are excluded. |
| Of all the a priori sciences of reason, therefore, mathematics alone can be learned. |
| Philosophy--unless it be in an historical manner--cannot be learned; we can at most learn to philosophize. |
| Philosophy is the system of all philosophical cognition. |
| We must use this term in an objective sense, if we understand by it the archetype of all attempts at philosophizing, and the standard by which all subjective philosophies are to be judged. |
| In this sense, philosophy is merely the idea of a possible science, which does not exist in concreto, but to which we endeavour in various ways to approximate, until we have discovered the right path to pursue--a path overgrown by the errors and illusions of sense--and the image we have hitherto tried in vain to shape has become a perfect copy of the great prototype. |
| Until that time, we cannot learn philosophy--it does not exist; if it does, where is it, who possesses it, and how shall we know it? |
| We can only learn to philosophize; in other words, we can only exercise our powers of reasoning in accordance with general principles, retaining at the same time, the right of investigating the sources of these principles, of testing, and even of rejecting them. |
| Until then, our conception of philosophy is only a scholastic conception--a conception, that is, of a system of cognition which we are trying to elaborate into a science; all that we at present know being the systematic unity of this cognition, and consequently the logical completeness of the cognition for the desired end. |