Page 185 - The Track Of The Jew Through The Ages - Alfred Rosenberg

Alfred Rosenberg

no counterpart among the Jewish researchers. Since Kant we
differentiate precisely between understanding and reason. By the
former we understand the capacity to collect the data provided by
sense-experience into an image and to connect it to the form of
causality, by the latter the capacity to combine all judgements of
the understanding into a unity.
Understanding produces knowledge, reason science, formed
knowledge. But when the reason also for its part collects data, it is
however spontaneously active in that, as a bold directing idea, it
extends feelers to new discoveries. The idea of the atom, the law of
the conservation of energy, the ether theory, these are indeed not
thoughts that any fool can think of, and which are not to be proved
easily logically and empirically. They are attempts of the creative
reason, of "the exact empirical imagination", as Goethe named it,
groping forwards. It went hand in hand with sound empirical
research.
It is now not hard to outline the sphere of the Jewish mind
with total strictness. It has always mastered that field of science
which is possessed only through the understanding. The lack of
imagination and inner quest, which damned the Jew to sterility in
religion and philosophy, emerges also in science. Not a single
creative scientific idea sprang from a Jewish mind, nowhere has it
pointed out new paths.
To be sure, Talmudists defend even today the old rabbis
and maintain that these had "already thousands ofyears ago" applied
themselves to the sciences and anticipated many modern discoveries.
Dr. Lippe, for example, declares that, in the Tractate Berachot, it
says that one who places his nuptial bed in a north-south direction
produces male children. He has read the same thing in a new medical
work! In the Talmud it is further declared that already hundreds of
generations had lived before Adam; and that that has now been
proved by modern anthropology.
In the face of such shortcomings one then scratches one's
head. Adam is not the embodiment of the first man generally but an
indubitably historical personality. And we hear further that the
modern discoveries have demonstrated that a man who occupies

162