My dear fellow! never be ashamed of scheming--you can't think of living less than 4000 years, and that would nearly suffice for your present schemes. To be sure, if they go on in the same ratio to the performance, then a small difficulty arises; but never mind! look at the bright side always and die in a dream! Oh!
The evil effect of a new hypothesis or even of a new nomenclature is, that many minds which had familiarised themselves to the old one, and were riding on the road of discovery accustomed to their horse, if put on a new animal, lose time in learning how to sit him; while the others, looking too stedfastly at a few facts which the jeweller Hypothesis had set in a perfectly beautiful whole, forget to dig for more, though inhabitants of a Golconda. However, it has its advantages too, and these have been ably pointed out. It excites contradiction, and is thence a stimulus to new experiments to _support_, and to a more severe repetition of these experiments and of other new ones to _confute_ [arguments pro and con]. And, besides, one must alloy severe truth with a little fancy, in order to mint it into common coin.
[Sidenote: HIS INDEBTEDNESS TO GERMAN PHILOSOPHY]
In the preface of my metaphysical works, I should say--"Once for all, read Kant, Fichte, &c., and then you will trace, or, if you are on the hunt, track me." Why, then, not acknowledge your obligations step by step? Because I could not do so in a multitude of glaring resemblances without a lie, for they had been mine, formed and full-formed, before I had ever heard of these writers, because to have fixed on the particular instances in which I have really been indebted to these writers would have been hard, if possible, to me who read for truth and self-satisfaction, and not to make a book, and who always rejoiced and was jubilant when I found my own ideas well expressed by others--and, lastly, let me say, because (I am proud, perhaps, but) I seem to know that much of the _matter_ remains my own, and that the _soul_ is mine. I fear not him for a critic who can confound a fellow-thinker with a compiler.
Good heavens! that there should be anything at all, and not nothing. Ask the bluntest faculty that pretends to reason, and, if indeed he have felt and reasoned, he must feel that something is to be sought after out of the vulgar track of Change-Alley speculation.