Lecture Four

Now I am quite convinced that the majority of you, on taking up these books, would very soon put them down again; for they are written in the learned language of modern philosophers and this language has a terminology unintelligible to those who are not versed in it—they first have to learn it. Nevertheless, whoever can cope with this language knows, or can know, that concealed in these books there is an immense amount of ingenuity of the kind that is possible to-day, and that in their painfully roundabout style there lies a kind of prophetic knowledge—though this should certainly be cultivated in a way quite different from his. However, we might perhaps say that this characteristic passion of his, to get to work on concocting the poison I spoke of for the other cooks and waiters, bears witness to the inner activity of this knowledge; otherwise, as an established Professor of Philosophy, he would never have said r Man has no more wisdom than an animal and is differentiated from the animal only by the fact that the animal lacks the mental capacity to seek after wisdom; man docs indeed seek after wisdom and is therefore rational because he has a foreshadowing of something he is unable to acquire.