My readers know that I only admit the word _idea_ in its primitive, that is Platonic, sense, and that I have treated this point at length and exhaustively in the Third Book of my chief work. The French and English, on the other hand, certainly attach a very commonplace, but quite clear and definite meaning to the word _idée_, or _idea_; whereas the Germans lose their heads as soon as they hear the word _Ideen_;[136] all presence of mind abandons them, and they feel as if they were about to ascend in a balloon. Here therefore was a field of action for our adepts in intellectual intuition; so the most impudent of them, the notorious _charlatan_ Hegel, without more ado, called his theory of the universe and of all things "_Die Idee_," and in this of course all thought that they had something to lay hold of. Still, if we inquire into the nature of these _ideas_ for which Reason is pronounced to be the faculty, without letting ourselves be put out of countenance, the explanation usually given is an empty, high-flown, confused verbiage, in set periods of such length, that if the reader does not fall asleep before he has half read it, he will find himself bewildered rather than enlightened at the end; nay, he may even have a suspicion that these ideas are very like chimæras. Meanwhile, should anyone show a desire to know more about this sort of ideas, he will have all kinds of things served up to him. Now it will be the chief subjects of the theses of Scholasticism--I allude here to the representations of God, of an immortal Soul, of a real, objectively existent World and its laws--which Kant himself has unfortunately called Ideas of Reason, erroneously and unjustifiably, as I have shown in my Critique of his philosophy, yet merely with a view to proving the utter impossibility of demonstrating them and their want of all theoretical authority. Then again it will be, as a variation, only God, Freedom, and Immortality; at other times it will be the Absolute, whose acquaintance we have already made in § 20, as the Cosmological Proof, forced to travel incognito; or the Infinite as opposed to the Finite; for, on the whole, the German reader is disposed to content himself with such empty talk as this, without perceiving that the only clear thought he can get out of it is, 'that which has an end' and 'that which has none.' 'The Good, the True, and the Beautiful,' moreover, stand high in favour with the sentimental and tender-hearted as pretended _ideas_, though they are really only three very wide and abstract conceptions, because they are extracted from a multitude of things and relations; wherefore, like many other such _abstracta_, they are exceedingly empty. As regards their contents, I have shown above (§ 29) that Truth is a quality belonging exclusively to judgments: that is, a logical quality; and as to the other two _abstracta_, I refer my readers partly to § 65 of the first volume, partly to the entire Third Book of my chief work. If, nevertheless, a very solemn and mysterious air is assumed and the eyebrows are raised up to the wig whenever these three meagre _abstracta_ are mentioned, young people may easily be induced to believe that something peculiar and inexpressible lies behind them, which entitles them to be called _ideas_, and harnessed to the triumphal car of this would-be metaphysical Reason.