>>19460352
It is a veritable misfortune that we have so little extant of the
works of the ancient masters and that not a single one of their works
was handed down to us complete. We are involuntarily influenced by
this loss, measuring therefore with false standards, and letting
ourselves be disposed more favorably toward Plato and Aristotle by the
sheer accident that they never lacked connoisseurs and copyists. Some
go so far as to assume a special destiny reserved for books, a fatum
libellorum. Such a fate would have to be malicious indeed to deprive
us of Heraclitus, of the wonderful poetry of Empedocles, and of the
writings of Democritus, thought by the ancients to be Plato's equal
and, so far as ingenuity is concerned, his superior, slipping us
instead the Stoics, the Epicureans, and Cicero. Very likely the most
impressive part of Greek thought and its verbal expression is lost to
us, a fate not to be wondered at if one remembers the misfortunes that
befell Scotus Erigena and Pascal and the fact that in even this
enlightened century the first edition of Schopenhauer's Welt als Wille
und Vorstelluna had to be sold for wastepaper. If someone wishes to
assume a special, fatal power governing such events, he may do so and
say with Goethe "Do not complain of the mean and the petty, for
regardless of what you have been told, the mean and the petty are
everywhere in control." That they are more in control than the power
of truth is certainly true. Mankind so rarely produces a good book,
one which with bold freedom sounds the battle-cry of truth, the song
of philosophic heroism. And yet the most wretched accidents, sudden
eclipses of men's minds, superstitious paroxysms and antipathies,
cramped or lazy writing fingers, down to book worms and rainfall, all
determine whether or not a book will live on another century or turn
into ashes and mould. But let us not lament or, in any event, remember
the consolatory words with which Hamann put an end to the lamentations
of scholars over lost works. "Did not the artist who squeezed a lentil
through the eye of a needle find enough lentils in a bushel to
practice his acquired skill? One should like to put this question to
all the scholars who make no better use of the works of the ancients
than that man did of his lentils."