Some books and authors will not
agree with me, and I have not dared to venture others. I have had a
volume of Hegel's _Logic_ on my table for a long time. I have
looked at it, I have smelled of it, but courage fails me.
Yet I am attracted to metaphysics more than to any other phase of
philosophy. Political philosophy, sociology and the common sense schools
please me least. Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, Comte and Spencer I have never
liked at all. Even their Utopias, which ought to be amusing, bore me
profoundly, and this has been true from Plato's _Republic_ to
Kropotkin's _Conquest of Bread_ and Wells's _A Modern Utopia_.
Nor could I ever become interested in the pseudo-philosophy of
anarchism. One of the books which have disappointed me the most is Max
Stirner's _Ego and His Own_.
Psychology is a science which I should like to know. I have therefore
skimmed through the standard works of Wundt and Ziehen. After reading
them, I came to the conclusion that the psychology which I am seeking,
day by day and every day, is not to be found in these treatises. It is
contained rather in the writings of Nietzsche and the novels of
Dostoievski. In the course of time, I may succeed, perhaps, in entering
the more abstract domains of the science.
VI
THE HISTORIANS
Miss Blimber, the school teacher in Dickens's _Dombey and Son_,
could have died happily had she known Cicero.
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