Even the Christian quietists must often have had little or no knowledge of each other; for example, Molinos and Madame de Guion of Tauler and the "_Deutsche Theologie_," or Gichtel of the former. In any case, the great difference of their culture, in that some of them, like Molinos, were learned, others, like Gichtel and many more, were the reverse, has no essential influence upon their teaching. Their great internal agreement, along with the firmness and certainty of their utterances, proves all the more that they speak from real inward experience, from an experience which certainly is not accessible to all, but is possessed only by a few favoured individuals, and therefore has received the name of the work of grace, the reality of which, however, for the above reasons, is not to be doubted. But in order to understand all this one must read the mystics themselves, and not be contented with second-hand reports of them; for every one must himself be comprehended before one judges concerning him. Thus to become acquainted with quietism I specially recommend Meister Eckhard, the "_Deutsche Theologie_," Tauler, Madame de Guion, Antoinette Bourignon, the English Bunyan, Molinos(50) and Gichtel. In the same way, as practical proofs and examples of the profound seriousness of asceticism, the life of Pascal, edited by Reuchlin, together with his history of the Port-Royal, and also the _Histoire de Sainte Elisabeth, par le comte de Montalembert_, and _La vie de Rancé, par Chateaubriand_, are very well worth reading, but yet by no means exhaust all that is important in this class. Whoever has read such writings, and compared their spirit with that of ascetism and quietism as it runs through all works of Brahmanism and Buddhism, and speaks in every page, will admit that every philosophy, which must in consistency reject that whole mode of thought, which it can only do by explaining the representatives of it to be either impostors or mad-men, must just on this account necessarily be false. But all European systems, with the exception of mine, find themselves in this position. Truly it must be an extraordinary madness which, under the most widely different circumstances and persons possible, spoke with such agreement, and, moreover, was raised to the position of a chief doctrine of their religion, by the most ancient and numerous peoples of the earth, something like three-fourths of all the inhabitants of Asia. But no philosophy can leave the theme of quietism and asceticism undecided if the question is proposed to it; because this theme is, in its matter, identical with that of all metaphysics and ethics. Here then is a point upon which I expect and desire that every philosophy, with its optimism, should declare itself. And if, in the judgment of contemporaries, the paradoxical and unexampled agreement of my philosophy with quietism and asceticism appears as an open stumbling-block, I, on the contrary, see just in that agreement a proof of its sole correctness and truth, and also a ground of explanation of why it is ignored and kept secret by the _Protestant_ universities.