Those who are so zealous and eager to settle debated questions by citing authorities, are really glad when they are able to put the understanding and the insight of others into the field in place of their own, which are wanting.  Their number is legion.  For, as Seneca says, there is no man but prefers belief to the exercise of judgment—­unusquisque mavult credere quam judicare.  In their controversies such people make a promiscuous use of the weapon of authority, and strike out at one another with it.  If any one chances to become involved in such a contest, he will do well not to try reason and argument as a mode of defence; for against a weapon of that kind these people are like Siegfrieds, with a skin of horn, and dipped in the flood of incapacity for thinking and judging.  They will meet his attack by bringing up their authorities as a way of abashing him—­argumentum ad verecundiam, and then cry out that they have won the battle.

In the real world, be it never so fair, favorable and pleasant, we always live subject to the law of gravity which we have to be constantly overcoming.  But in the world of intellect we are disembodied spirits, held in bondage to no such law, and free from penury and distress.  Thus it is that there exists no happiness on earth like that which, at the auspicious moment, a fine and fruitful mind finds in itself.

The presence of a thought is like the presence of a woman we love.  We fancy we shall never forget the thought nor become indifferent to the dear one.  But out of sight, out of mind!  The finest thought runs the risk of being irrevocably forgotten if we do not write it down, and the darling of being deserted if we do not marry her.

There are plenty of thoughts which are valuable to the man who thinks them; but only few of them which have enough strength to produce repercussive or reflect action—­I mean, to win the reader’s sympathy after they have been put on paper.

But still it must not be forgotten that a true value attaches only to what a man has thought in the first instance for his own case.  Thinkers may be classed according as they think chiefly for their own case or for that of others.  The former are the genuine independent thinkers; they really think and are really independent; they are the true philosophers; they alone are in earnest.  The pleasure and the happiness of their existence consists in thinking.  The others are the sophists; they want to seem that which they are not, and seek their happiness in what they hope to get from the world.  They are in earnest about nothing else.  To which of these two classes a man belongs may be seen by his whole style and manner.  Lichtenberg is an example for the former class; Herder, there can be no doubt, belongs to the second.