Statistics will not merely prove that I appear as often as any French or English newspaper, but also that I am less read than any newspaper in the civilised world. Numerical tables instruct the public without exciting their emotions. Thus the Preussische Staats-Zeitung is not without modern philosophical foundations, in spite of its apparent positivism. It does not stop at number, temporal magnitude. It carries the recognition of the quantitative principle further and proclaims the justification of spatial magnitude.
Space is the first thing whose magnitude impresses the child.
It is the first magnitude which the child encounters in the world. Hence the child holds a big man to be a great man, and in the same childish way the Staats-Zeitung informs us that thick books are incomparably better than thin ones, and much more so than single leaflets or newspapers, which produce only one printed sheet daily. Write really voluminous books on the organisation of the state, books of solid learning, which no one reads except the Herr Author and the Herr Reviewer, but bear in mind that your newspapers are not books. Therefore do not seek the spirit of our day or time in newspapers, which offer you statistical tables, but seek it in books, whose size guarantees their solidity. Study in the school of thick books and you will quickly get to love us newspapers on account of our flimsy format, our gentlemanly lightness, which is truly refreshing after the thick books.