Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Schopenhauer as educatorterns; nowadays they have lost all this old arrogance and are as a rulepious, timid and uncertain fo lk, never brave like Lucretius or wrathfulat human oppression. Neither can one any longer learn fromthem how to think logically and, with a correct estimation of theirpowers, they have ceased the formal disputations they used to practise.It is indisputable that the individual sciences are now pursuedmore logically, cautiously, modestly, inventively, in short morephilosophically, than is the case with so-called philosophers: so thateveryone will agree with the impartial Englishman Bagehot when hesays of our contemporary system-builders: 'Who is not almost surebeforehand that they will contain a strange mixture of truth anderror, and therefore that it will not be worthwhile to spend life inreasoning over their consequences? The mass of a system attracts theyoung and impresses the unwary; but cultivated people are verydubious about it. They are ready to receive hints and suggestionsand the smallest real truth is ever welcome. But a large book ofdeductive philosophy is much to be suspected. Unproved abstractprinciples without number have been eagerly caught up by sanguinemen and then carefully spun out into books and theories which wereto explain the whole world. The world goes totally against theseabstractions, and it must do so since they require it to go inantagonistic directions." If formerly philosophers, especially inGermany, used to be sunk in such profound reflection that they werein constant danger of hitting their head on a beam, they are now suppliedwith a whole regiment of flappers, such as Swift describes in theVoyage to Laputa, to give them a gentle blow now and then on theeyes or elsewhere. Sometimes these blows may be a little too heavy,on which occasions the enraptured thinker can easily forget himselfand hit back - something that always results in his discomfiture.Can't you see the beam, you sleepy-head! the flapper then says - andoften the philosopher really does see the beam and becomes tractableagain. These flappers are history and the natural sciences; theyhave gradually come so to overawe the German dream-andthought-business which was for long confused with philosophy thatthese thought-mongers would be only too glad to abandon anyattempt at an independent existence; ifhowever they should happento impede the former or try to fas ten leading-strings on to them, theflappers at once start to flap as violently as they can - as though they*Quoted from Bagehot's Physics and Politics . The order of the sentences in theoriginal passage is inverted in Nietzsche's quotation of it, but this appears not to affectthe meaning.189