44

74

Yet Hegel's followers, instead of going to work to reform
their master's system, and to render his statement of
it obsolete, as every true philosopher must
desire that his disciples should do, only proposed, at
best, some superficial changes without replacing
at all the rotten material with which the system
was built up.

Things were in that condition
when I devoted two years of daily hard labor,
with active, wide-awake, thought, to making out,
as well as I could, what the first categories really
were. I have near a ream of carefully pondered
statements of my work, and the result was a
paper printed in 1867 and filling ten pages. When
that was done, I dismissed the matter from my
thoughts very largely and when I thought of cultivated