[BNP/E3, 93A – 54]

“Eliaticorum Philosophorum Fragmenta” gr. et lat., cum commentario edidit F.G. Mullach Berol. 1845.

3s.

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And so, a hater of reading and a lover of thought, little out of my childhood a new and a glorious sense of things came to me. I felt deeply original {…}

Great credit to me for finding it, but for its newness, alas! My theory was none other than idealism. Such must have been the feeling of the first philosopher on whom the truth damned.

Peeping once, after my way, into a book, I perceived then, oh! with what anguish – in terms to me stupendously issued and precise, because they reproduced on nature one’s great conception of what I had thought new and mine, mine alone.

[54a^r]

I perceived there the theory I had so dearly nursed. My anguish and jealousy cannot be conceived. Yet I was in some way pleased at this – that I had had thoughts that a great man had had. But commentators of the author – the very knowledge that they existed and that they were professors of philosophy who expanded the author – made me soon sick again with jealousy, envy, anguish. Some one besides me had understood him! So then the thoughts which had been mine were everybody’s, were so easy of comprehension – so widely spread – the theories so well known. My anguish and rage were inconceivable.

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Anthony Harris

Anthony Harris  Anthony Harris