Note 1 — LETTER IV.

The details of this scandalous act of vandalism, which though it nearly cost me my life, I did not even mention in the preface to my large German and English Lexicon, finished in the course of the same year, are too diffuse and complicated, to be noticed here. As the leading personages of this drama, however, were the representatives of powerful and influential ecclesiastical organizations, and as shortly before, repeated and desperate proselyting efforts had been made by some of these men, and by their miserable underlings, I cannot possibly be wrong in designating the vile commotion, by which I was swept from my post, as the venomous explosion of ignoble and of bigoted elements, which have in fact been the prolific source of all the confusion I complain of now. I distinctly remember the treacherous and inquisitorial anxiousness of a certain (now) president of a prominent University, (with whom I was reading Logic,) to become acquainted with German metaphysics, the mysterious meetings of a certain ecclesiastical committee, the efforts of a certain temperance coterie at a certain hotel, and a dozen other despicable conclaves and combinations, whose machinations were too palpable to be mistaken or forgotten. I also know, that a certain philosophy to which I was known to be particularly partial, is looked upon with jealous suspicion by certain superficial and insignificant pretenders to that science, whose ignorance and malice forges weapons of destruction out of the noblest and sublimest conceptions that have ever emanated from the intellect of man. To all these ambitious and noisy enemies of intellectual freedom, whose littleness asperses, calumniates and levels whatever is gigantic and sublime, I would here say, once for all, that if they could but rationally comprehend this Goethe, this Jean Paul, this Fichte, Kant and Hegel, whom they regard with so much horror, their moral regeneration would almost be beyond a doubt, and if they could think and write like them, their title to enduring fame would never need an advocate or petty trickster to defend it.