Note 34 — CONTENTS

(p. 21). Just as love and hate may be directed towards single individuals, so also they may be directed to whole classes. This Aristotle has already observed. We are, he thinks, “not only angry with the individual thief who has robbed us, and with the individual sycophant who deceives our confiding nature, but we hate thieves and sycophants in general” (Rhet. ii. 4). Acts of loving and hating, where in this way there is an underlying general conception, also possess frequently the character of rightness. And so quite naturally along with the experience of this given act of love or hate, the goodness or badness of the entire class becomes manifest at one stroke, and apart from every induction from special cases. In this way, for example, we attain to the general knowledge that insight as such is good. It is easy to understand how near the temptation lies, in the case of such knowledge of a general truth without any induction from single cases otherwise demanded in truths of experience, entirely to overlook the preparatory experience of a feeling having the character of rightness, and to regard the universal judgment as an immediate synthetic à priori form of knowledge. Herbart’s very remarkable doctrine of a sudden elevation to general ethical principles seems to me to point to the fact that he had observed something of this peculiar process without at the same time becoming quite clear about it.