The Difference between French, English, and German Philosophy

A Frenchman, an Englishman, and a German each undertook a study of the camel.

The Frenchman went to the zoo, spend half an hour there, questioned the staff, threw bread to the camel, poked it with the front of his umbrella, and, returning home, wrote an essay for the papers, full of sharp and witty observations.

The Englishman, taking his tea basked and a good deal of camping equipment, went to set up camp in the Orient, returning after a sojourn of two or three years with a fat volume, full of raw, disorganized, and inconclusive facts which, nevertheless, had real documentary value.

As for the German, filled with disdain for the Frenchman’s frivolity and the Englishmans’ lack of metaphysical ideas, he locked himself in his room, and there he drafted a multi-volume work entiteled: The Idea of the Camel Derived from the Concept of the Ego.