The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 05

It depends upon you whether you will be the last of a dishonorable race, even more surely despised by posterity than it deserves, and in whose history—if there can be any history in the barbarism which will then begin—succeeding generations will rejoice when it perishes and will praise fate that it is just; or whether you will be the beginning and the point of development of a new age which will be glorious beyond all your expectations, and become those from whom posterity will date the year of their salvation. Bethink yourselves that you are the last in whose power this great change lies. You have heard the Germans called a unit; you have still a visible sign of their unity—an Empire and an Imperial League—or you have heard of it; among you even yet, from time to time, voices have been audible which were inspired by this higher patriotism. After you become accustomed to other concepts and will accept alien forms and a different course of occupation and of life—how long will it then be before no one longer lives who has seen Germans or who has heard of them?

What is demanded of you is not much. You should only keep before you the necessity of pulling yourselves together for a little time and of reflecting upon what lies immediately and obviously before your eyes. You should merely form for yourselves a fixed opinion regarding this situation, remain true to it, and utter and express it in your immediate surroundings. It is the presupposition, yea, it is our firm conviction, that this reflection will lead to the same result in all of you; that, if you only seriously consider, and do not continue in your previous heedlessness, you will think in harmony; and that, if you can bring your intelligence to bear, and if only you do not continue to vegetate, unanimity and unity of spirit will come of themselves. If, however, matters once reach this point, all else that we need will result automatically.

This reflection is, moreover, demanded from each one of you who can still consider for himself something lying obviously before his eyes. You have time for this; events will not take you unawares; the records of the negotiations conducted with you will remain before your eyes. Lay them not from your hands until you are in unity with your selves. Neither let, oh, let not yourselves be made supine by reliance upon others or upon anything whatsoever that lies outside yourselves, nor yet through the unintelligent belief of our time that the epochs of history are made by the agency of some unknown power without any aid from man. These addresses have never wearied in impressing upon you that absolutely nothing can help you but yourselves, and they find it necessary to repeat this to the last moment. Rain and dew, fruitful or unfruitful years, may indeed be made by a power which is unknown to us and is not under our control; but only men themselves—and absolutely no power outside them—give to each epoch its particular stamp. Only when they are all equally blind and ignorant do they fall the victims of this hidden power, though it is within their own control not to be blind and ignorant. It is true that to whatever degree, greater or less, things may go ill with us, in part depends upon that unknown power; but far more is it dependent upon the intelligence and the good will of those to whom we are subjected. Whether, on the other hand, it will ever again be well with us depends wholly upon ourselves; and surely nevermore will any welfare whatsoever come to us unless we ourselves acquire it for ourselves—especially unless each individual among us toils and labors in his own way as though he were alone and as though the salvation of future generations depended solely upon him.

This is what you have to do; and these addresses adjure you to do this without delay.

They adjure you, young men! I, who have long since ceased to belong to you, maintain—and I have also expressed my conviction in these addresses—that you are yet more capable of every thought transcending the commonplace, and are more easily aroused to all that is good and great, because your time of life still lies closer to the years of childish innocence and of nature. Very differently does the majority of the older generation regard this fundamental trait in you. It accuses you of arrogance, of a rash, presumptuous judgment which soars beyond your strength, of obstinacy, and of desire of innovation; yet it merely smiles good-naturedly at these, your errors. All this, it thinks, is based simply on your lack of knowledge of the world, that is, of universal human corruption, since it has eyes for nothing else on earth. You are now supposed to have courage only because you hope to find help-mates like-minded with yourselves and because you do not know the grim and stubborn resistance which will be opposed to your projects of improvement. When the youthful fire of your imagination shall once have vanished, when you shall have perceived the universal selfishness, idleness, and horror of work, when you yourselves shall once rightly have tasted the sweetness of plodding on in the customary rut—then the desire to be better and wiser than all others will soon fade away. They do not by any chance entertain these good expectations of you in imagination alone; they have found them confirmed in their own persons. They must confess that in the days of their foolish youth they dreamed of improving the world, exactly as you dream today; yet with increasing maturity they have become tame and quiet as you see them now. I believe them; in my own experience, which has not been very protracted, I have seen that young men who at first roused different hopes nevertheless, later, exactly fulfilled the kind expectations of mature age. Do this no longer, young men, for how else could a better generation ever begin? The bloom of youth will indeed fall from you, and the flame of imagination will cease to be nourished from itself; but feed this flame and brighten it through clear thought, make this way of thinking your own, and as an additional gift you will gain character, the fairest adornment of man. Through this clear thinking you will preserve the fountain of eternal youth; however your bodies grow old or your knees become feeble, your spirit will be reborn in freshness ever renewed, and your character will stand firm and unchangeable. Seize at once the opportunity here offered you; reflect clearly upon the theme presented for your deliberation; and the clarity which has dawned for you in one point will gradually spread over all others as well.

These addresses adjure you, old men! You are regarded as you have just heard, and you are told so to your faces; and for his own past the speaker frankly adds that—excluding the exceptions which, it must be admitted, not infrequently occur, and which are all the more admirable—the world is perfectly right with regard to the great majority among you. Go through the history of the last two or three decades; everything except yourselves agrees—and even you yourselves agree, each one in the specialty that does not immediately concern him—that (always excluding the exceptions, and regarding only the majority) the greatest uselessness and selfishness are found in advanced years in all branches, in science as well as in practical occupations. The whole world has witnessed that every one who desired the better and the more perfect still had to wage the bitterest battle with you in addition to the battle with his own uncertainty and with his other surroundings; that you were firmly resolved that nothing must thrive which you had not done and known in the same way; that you regarded every impulse of thought as an insult to your intelligence; and that you left no power unutilized to conquer in this battle against improvement—and in fact you generally did prevail. Thus you were the impeding power against all the improvements which kindly nature offered us from her ever—youthful womb until you were gathered to the dust which you were before, and until the succeeding generations, which were at war with you, had become like unto you and had adopted your attitude. Now, also, you need only conduct yourselves as you have previously acted in case of all propositions for amelioration; you need only again prefer to the general weal your empty honor in order that there may be nothing between heaven and earth that you have not already fathomed; then, through this last battle, you are relieved from all further battle; no improvement will accrue, but deterioration will follow in the footsteps of deterioration, and thus there will be much satisfaction in reserve for you.

No one will suppose that I despise and depreciate old age as old age. If only the source of primitive life and of its continuance is absorbed into life through freedom, then clarity—and strength with it—increases so long as life endures. Such a life is easier to live; the dross of earthly origin falls away more and ever more; it is ennobled to the life eternal and strives toward it. The experience of such an old age is irreconcilable with evil, and it only makes the means clearer and the skill more adroit victoriously to battle against wickedness. Deterioration through increasing age is simply the fault of our time, and it necessarily results in every place where society is much corrupted. It is not nature which corrupts us—she produces us in innocence; it is society. He who has once surrendered to the influence of society must naturally become ever worse and worse the longer he is exposed to this influence. It would be worth the trouble to investigate the history of other extremely corrupt generations in this regard, and to see whether—for example, under the rule of the Roman emperors—what was once bad did not continually become worse with increasing age.

First of all, therefore, these addresses adjure you, old men and experienced—you who form the exception! Confirm, strengthen, counsel in this matter the younger generation, which reverently looks up to you. And the rest of you also, who are average souls, they adjure! If you are not to help, at least do not interfere, this time; do not again—as always hitherto—put yourselves in the way with your wisdom and with your thousand hesitations. This thing, like every rational thing in the world, is not complicated, but simple; and it also belongs among the thousand matters which you know not. If your wisdom could save, it would surely have saved us before; for it is you who have counseled us thus far. Now, like everything else, all this is forgiven you, and you should no longer be reproached with it. Only learn at last once to know yourselves, and be silent.

These addresses adjure you men of affairs! With few exceptions you have thus far been cordially hostile to abstract thought and to all learning which desired to be something for itself, even though you demeaned yourselves as if you merely haughtily despised all this. As far as you possibly could, you held from you the men who did such things as well as their propositions; the reproach of lunacy, or the advice that they be sent to the mad-house, was the thanks from you on which they might usually count. They, in their turn, did not venture to express themselves regarding you with the same frankness, since they were dependent upon you; but their innermost thought was this, that, with a few exceptions, you were shallow babblers and inflated braggarts, dilettante who have only passed through school, blind gropers and creepers in the old rut who had neither wish nor ability for aught else. Give them the lie through your deeds, and to this end grasp the opportunity now offered you; lay aside that contempt for profound thought and learning; let yourselves be advised and hear and learn what you do not know, or else your accusers win their case.

These addresses adjure you, thinkers, scholars, and authors who are still worthy of this name! In a certain sense that reproach of the men of affairs was not unjust. You often proceeded too unconcerned in the realm of abstract thought, without troubling yourselves about the actual world and without considering how the one might be connected with the other; you circumscribed your own world for yourselves, and let the real world lie to one side, disdained and despised. Every regulation and every formation of actual life must, it is true, proceed from the higher regulating concept, and progress in the customary rut is insufficient for it; this is an eternal truth, and, in God's name, it crushes with undisguised contempt every one who is so bold as to busy himself with affairs without knowing this. Yet between the concept and the introduction of it into any individual life there is a great gulf fixed. The filling of this gulf is the task both of the men of affairs—who, however, must already first have learned enough to understand you—and also of yourselves, who should not forget life on account of the world of thought. Here you both meet. Instead of regarding each other askance and depreciating each other across the gulf, endeavor rather to fill it, each on his own side, and thus seek to construct the road to union. At last, I beg you, realize that you both are as mutually necessary to each other as head and arm are indispensable the one to the other.

In other respects as well, these addresses adjure you, thinkers, scholars, and authors who are still worthy of this name! Your laments over the general shallowness, thoughtlessness, and superficiality, over self-conceit and inexhaustible babble, over the contempt for seriousness and profundity in all classes, may be true, even as they actually are. Yet what class is it, pray, that has educated all these classes, that has transformed everything pertaining to science into a jest for them, and that has trained them from their earliest youth in that self-conceit and that babble? Who is it, pray, who still continues to educate the generations that have outgrown the schools? The most obvious source of the torpor of the age is that it has read itself torpid in the writings which you have written. Why are you, nevertheless, so continually solicitous to amuse this idle people, despite the fact that you know that they have learned nothing and wish to learn nothing? Why do you call them "the Public," flatter them as your judge, stir them up against your rivals, and seek by every means to win this blind and confused mob over to your side? Finally, in your literary reviews and in your magazines, why do you yourselves furnish them with material and example for rash judgments by yourselves judging as unconnectedly, as carelessly, as recklessly, and, for the most part, as tastelessly as even the least of your readers could? If you do not all think thus, and if among you there are still some animated by better sentiments, why, then, do not these latter unite to put an end to the evil? As to those men of affairs, in particular they have passed through your schools—you say so yourselves. Why, then, did you not at least make use of this transit of theirs to inspire in them some silent respect for learning, and especially to break betimes the self-conceit of the young aristocrat and to show him that birth and station are of no assistance in the realm of thought? If, perchance, even at that time you flattered him and exalted him unduly, now endure that for which you yourselves are responsible.

These addresses desire to excuse you on the supposition that you had not grasped the importance of your occupation; they adjure you that, from this hour, you make yourselves acquainted with this importance, and that you no longer ply your occupation as a mere trade. Learn to respect yourselves, and by your actions show that you do so, and the world will respect you. You will give the first proof of this through the amount of influence which you assume in regard to the resolution that is proposed, and through the manner in which you conduct yourselves regarding it.

These addresses adjure you, princes of Germany! Those who act toward you as though no man dared say aught to you, or had aught to say, are despicable flatterers, are base slanderers of you yourselves. Drive them far from you! The truth is that you were born exactly as ignorant as all the rest of us, and that, exactly like ourselves, you must hear and learn if you are to escape from this natural ignorance. Your share in bringing about the fate which has befallen you simultaneously with your peoples is here set forth in the mildest way and, as we believe, in the way which is alone right and just; and in case you wish to hear only flattery, and never the truth, you cannot complain regarding these addresses. Let all this be forgotten, even as all the rest of us also desire that our share in the guilt may be forgotten. Now begins a new life as well for yourselves as for all of us. May this voice penetrate to you through all the surroundings which normally make you inaccessible! With proud self-reliance it dares to say to you: You rule nations, faithful, plastic, and worthy of good fortune, such as princes of no time and of no nation have ruled. They have a feeling for freedom and are capable of it; but, because you so willed, they have followed you into sanguinary war against that which to them seemed freedom. Some among you have later willed otherwise, and, again because you so willed, they have followed you into that which to them must seem a war of annihilation against one of the last remnants of German independence. Since that time they have endured and have borne the oppressive burden of common woes; yet they do not cease to be faithful to you, to cling to you with inward devotion, and to love you as their divinely appointed guardians. Yet may you notice them, unobserved by them; set free from surroundings which do not invariably present to you the fairest aspect of humanity, may you be able to descend into the house of the citizen, into the peasant's cottage, and may you be able attentively to follow the still and hidden life of these classes, in which the fidelity and the probity which have become more rare in the higher classes seem to have sought refuge! Surely, oh, surely, you will resolve to reflect more seriously than ever how they may be helped! These addresses have proposed to you a means of assistance which they believe to be sure, thorough, and decisive. Let your councillors deliberate whether they also find it so or whether they know a better means, provided only that it be equally decisive. But the conviction that something must be done and must be done immediately, that this something must be radical and final, and that the time for half-measures and procrastination is past—this conviction these addresses would fain produce, if they could, in you personally, as they still cherish the utmost confidence in your integrity.

These addresses adjure you, Germans as a whole, whatever position you may take in society, that each one among you who can think, think first of all upon the theme that has been suggested, and that each one do for it exactly what in his own place lies nearest to him.

Your forefathers unite with these addresses and adjure you. Imagine that in my voice are mingled the voices of your ancestors from dim antiquity, who with their bodies opposed the on-rushing dominion of the world-power of Rome, who with their blood won the independence of the mountains, plains, and streams which, under your governance, have become the booty of the stranger. They call to you: Represent us; transmit to posterity our memory honorable and blameless as it came to you, and as you have boasted of it and of descent from us. Thus far our resistance has been held to be noble and great and wise; we seemed to be initiated into the secrets of the divine plan of the universe. If our race terminates with you, our honor is turned to shame and our wisdom to folly. For if the German stock was some time to be merged into that of Rome, it was better that this had been into the old Rome than into a new. We faced the former and conquered it; before the latter you have been scattered like the dust. Now, however, since affairs are as they are, you are not to conquer them with physical weapons; only your spirit is to rise and stand upright over against them. To you has been vouchsafed the greater destiny of establishing generally the empire of the spirit and of reason, and of wholly annihilating rude physical power as that which dominates the world. If you shall do this, then are you worthy of descent from us.

In these voices also mingle the spirits of your later ancestors, of those who fell in the holy struggle for freedom of religion and of faith. Save our honor, likewise, they cry to you. It was not wholly clear to us for what we fought. Besides the legitimate resolve not to allow ourselves to be dominated in matters of conscience by a foreign power, we were also impelled by a higher spirit who never revealed himself entirely unto us. To you this spirit is revealed, if you have the power to look into the spirit world, and he gazes upon you with clear and lofty eyes. The motley and confused intermingling of sensuous and of spiritual impulses is wholly to be deposed from its world-dominion; and spirit alone, absolute, and stripped of all sensuous impulses, is to take the helm of human affairs. Our blood was shed that this spirit might have freedom to develop and to grow to an independent existence. Upon you it depends to give to this sacrifice its signification and its justification by installing this spirit into the world-dominion destined for him. If this is not the final goal toward which all the development of our nation has thus far aimed, our struggles, too, become a passing, empty farce, and the freedom of spirit and of conscience that we won is an empty word, if henceforth there is to be no longer any spirit or any conscience whatsoever.

Your descendants, still unborn, adjure you. You boast of your forefathers, they cry to you, and proudly you connect yourselves with a noble lineage. Take care that the chain may not be broken in you; so do that we also may boast of you, and that through you, as through a faultless link, we may connect ourselves with the same glorious lineage. Cause us not to be compelled to be ashamed of our descent from you as a descent that is low, barbarous, and slavish, so that we must conceal our ancestry or must feign an alien name and an alien lineage, lest we be immediately rejected or trodden under foot without further test. On the next generation that will proceed from you, will depend your fame in history: honorable, if this honorably witnesses for you; but ignominious, even beyond desert, if you have no offspring to speak for you, and if it is left to the victor to write your history. Never yet has a victor had sufficient inclination or sufficient knowledge rightly to judge the conquered. The more he abases them, the more justified does he appear. Who can know what mighty deeds, what magnificent institutions, and what noble customs of many a people of antiquity have been forgotten because their posterity was subjugated, and because, ungainsaid, the conqueror made his report upon them in accordance with his interests?

Even foreign lands adjure you so far as they still understand themselves in the very least, and still have an eye for their true advantage. Indeed, there are spirits among all peoples who still cannot believe that the great promises made to the human race of a reign of justice, of reason, and of truth can be a vain and an empty phantom, and who assume, therefore, that the present iron age is but a transit to a better state. They—and all modern humanity in them—count on you. A great part of this humanity is descended from us; the rest have received from us religion and culture. The former adjure us by the soil of our common fatherland, which is also their cradle, and which they have bequeathed free to us; the latter adjure us by the culture which they have acquired from us as a pledge of a higher happiness—they adjure us to maintain ourselves as we have ever been, for their sake; and not to suffer this member, which is of so much importance, to be torn from the continuity of the race that is newly budded, lest they may painfully miss us if they some time need our counsel, our example, our cooperation toward the true goal of earthly life.

All generations, all the wise and good who have ever breathed upon this earth, all their thoughts and aspirations for something higher mingle in these voices and surround you and lift to you imploring hands. Even Providence, if we may so say, and the divine plan of the universe in the creation of a human race—a plan which, indeed, exists only to be thought out by man and to be realized by man—adjures you to save its honor and its existence. Whether those are justified who have believed that mankind must always grow better, and that the conception of a certain order and dignity among them is no empty dream, but the prophecy and the pledge of an ultimate actuality, or whether those are to prevail who slumber on in their animal and vegetative life, and who mock every flight to higher worlds-upon these alternatives it is left to you to pass a final and decisive judgment. The ancient world with its magnificence and with its grandeur, and also with its faults, has sunk through its own unworthiness and through your fathers' prowess. If there is truth in what has been presented in these addresses, then, among all modern peoples, it is you in whom the germ of the perfecting of humanity most decidedly lies, and on whom progress in the development of this humanity is enjoined. If you perish as a nation, all the hope of the entire human race for rescue from the depths of its woe perishes together with you. Do not hope and console yourselves with the imaginary idea, counting on mere repetition of events that have already happened, that once more, after the fall of the old civilization, a new one, proceeding from a half-barbarous nation, will arise upon the ruins of the first. In antiquity such a nation, equipped with all the requisites for this destiny, was at hand, and was very well known to the nation of culture, and was described by them; had they been able to imagine their destruction, they themselves might have found in that half-barbarous nation the means of their restoration. To us, also, the entire surface of the earth is very well known, and all the peoples that live upon it. Do we, then, now know any such people, like to the aborigines of the New World, of whom similar expectations may be entertained? I believe that every one who has not merely a fanatical opinion and hope, but who thinks after profound investigation, will be compelled to answer this question in the negative. There is, therefore, no escape; if you sink, all humanity sinks with you, devoid of hope of restoration at any future time.

This it was, gentlemen, that at the close of these addresses I felt compelled to impress upon you as representatives of the nation and, through you, upon the nation as a whole.

FRIEDRICH WILHELM JOSEPH VON SCHELLING

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ON THE RELATION OF THE PLASTIC ARTS TO NATURE (1807)

A Speech on the Celebration of the 12th October, 1807, as the Name-Day of His Majesty the King of Bavaria Delivered before the Public Assembly of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Munich

TRANSLATED BY J. ELLIOT CABOT

Plastic Art, according to the most ancient expression, is silent Poetry. The inventor of this definition no doubt meant thereby that the former, like the latter, is to express spiritual thoughts—conceptions whose source is the soul; only not by speech, but, like silent Nature, by shape, by form, by corporeal, independent works.

Plastic Art, therefore, evidently stands as a uniting link between the soul and Nature, and can be apprehended only in the living centre of both. Indeed, since Plastic Art has its relation to the soul in common with every other art, and particularly with Poetry, that by which it is connected with Nature, and, like Nature, a productive force, remains as its sole peculiarity; so that to this alone can a theory relate which shall be satisfactory to the understanding, and helpful and profitable to Art itself.

We hope, therefore, in considering Plastic Art in relation to its true prototype and original source, Nature, to be able to contribute something new to its theory—to give some additional exactness or clearness to the conceptions of it; but, above all, to set forth the coherence of the whole structure of Art in the light of a higher necessity.

But has not Science always recognized this relation? Has not indeed every theory of modern times taken its departure from this very position, that Art should be the imitator of Nature? Such has indeed been the case. But what should this broad general proposition profit the artist, when the notion of Nature is of such various interpretation, and when there are almost as many differing views of it as there are various modes of life? Thus, to one, Nature is nothing more than the lifeless aggregate of an indeterminable crowd of objects, or the space in which, as in a vessel, he imagines things placed; to another, only the soil from which he draws his nourishment and support; to the inspired seeker alone, the holy, ever-creative original energy of the world, which generates and busily evolves all things out of itself.

The proposition would indeed have a high significance, if it taught Art to emulate this creative force; but the sense in which it was meant can scarcely be doubtful to one acquainted with the universal condition of Science at the time when it was first brought forward. Singular enough that the very persons who denied all life to Nature should set it up for imitation in Art! To them might be applied the words of a profound writer:[5 - J.G. Hamann. Hellenistische Briefe I, 189.] "Your lying philosophy has put Nature out of the way; and why do you call upon us to imitate her? Is it that you may renew the pleasure by perpetrating the same violence on the disciples of Nature?"

Nature was to them not merely a dumb, but an altogether lifeless image, in whose inmost being even no living word dwelt; a hollow scaffolding of forms, of which as hollow an image was to be transferred to the canvas, or hewn out of stone.

This was the proper doctrine of those more ancient and savage nations, who, as they saw in Nature nothing divine, fetched idols out of her; whilst, to the susceptive Greeks, who everywhere felt the presence of a vitally efficient principle, genuine gods arose out of Nature.

But is, then, the disciple of Nature to copy everything in Nature without distinction?—and, of everything, every part? Only beautiful objects should be represented; and, even in these, only the Beautiful and Perfect.

Thus is the proposition further determined, but, at the same time, this asserted, that, in Nature, the perfect is mingled with the imperfect, the beautiful with the unbeautiful. Now, how should he who stands in no other relation to Nature than that of servile imitation, distinguish the one from the other? It is the way of imitators to appropriate the faults of their model sooner and easier than its excellences, since the former offer handles and tokens more easily grasped; and thus we see that imitators of Nature in this sense have imitated oftener, and even more affectionately, the ugly than the beautiful.

If we regard in things, not their principle, but the empty abstract form, neither will they say anything to our soul; our own heart, our own spirit we must put to it, that they answer us.

But what is the perfection of a thing? Nothing else than the creative life in it, its power to exist. Never, therefore, will he, who fancies that Nature is altogether dead, be successful in that profound process (analogous to the chemical) whence proceeds, purified as by fire, the pure gold of Beauty and Truth.

Nor was there any change in the main view of the relation of Art to Nature, even when the unsatisfactoriness of the principle began to be more generally felt; no change, even by the new views and new knowledge so nobly established by John Winckelmann. He indeed restored to the soul its full efficiency in Art, and raised it from its unworthy dependence into the realm of spiritual freedom. Powerfully moved by the beauty of form in the works of antiquity, he taught that the production of ideal Nature, of Nature elevated above the Actual, together with the expression of spiritual conceptions, is the highest aim of Art.

But if we examine in what sense this surpassing of the Actual by Art has been understood by the most, it turns out that, with this view also, the notion of Nature as mere product, of things as a lifeless result, still continued; and the idea of a living creative Nature was in no wise awakened by it. Thus these ideal forms also could be animated by no positive insight into their nature; and if the forms of the Actual were dead for the dead beholder, these were not less so. Were no independent production of the Actual possible, neither would there be of the Ideal. The object of the imitation was changed; the imitation remained. In the place of Nature were substituted the sublime works of Antiquity, whose outward forms the pupils busied themselves in imitating, but without the spirit that fills them. These forms, however, are as unapproachable, nay, more so, than the works of Nature, and leave us yet colder if we bring not to them the spiritual eye to penetrate through the veil and feel the stirring energy within.

On the other hand, artists, since that time, have indeed received a certain ideal impetus, and notions of a beauty superior to matter; but these notions were like fair words, to which the deeds do not correspond. While the previous method in Art produced bodies without soul, this view taught only the secret of the soul, but not that of the body. The theory had, as usual, passed with one hasty stride to the opposite extreme; but the vital mean it had not yet found.

Who can say that Winckelmann had not penetrated into the highest beauty? But with him it appeared in its dissevered elements only: on the one side as beauty in idea, and flowing out from the soul; on the other, as beauty of forms.

But what is the efficient link that connects the two? Or by what power is the soul created together with the body, at once and as if with one breath? If this lies not within the power of Art, as of Nature, then it can create nothing whatever. This vital connecting link, Winckelmann did not determine; he did not teach how, from the idea, forms can be produced. Thus Art went over to that method which we would call the retrograde, since it strives from the form to come at the essence. But not thus is the Unlimited reached; it is not attainable by mere enhancement of the Limited. Hence, such works as have had their beginning in form, with all elaborateness on that side, show, in token of their origin, an incurable want at the very point where we expect the consummate, the essential, the final. The miracle by which the Limited should be raised to the Unlimited, the human become divine, is wanting; the magic circle is drawn, but the spirit that it should inclose, appears not, being disobedient to the call of him who thought a creation possible through mere form.

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Nature meets us everywhere, at first with reserve, and in form more or less severe. She is like that quiet and serious beauty, that excites not attention by noisy advertisement, nor attracts the vulgar gaze.

How can we, as it were, spiritually melt this apparently rigid form, so that the pure energy of things may flow together with the force of our spirit and both become one united mold? We must transcend Form, in order to gain it again as intelligible, living, and truly felt. Consider the most beautiful forms; what remains behind after you have abstracted from them the creative principle within? Nothing but mere unessential qualities, such as extension and the relations of space. Does the fact that one portion of matter exists near another, and distinct from it, contribute anything to its inner essence? or does it not rather contribute nothing? Evidently the latter. It is not mere contiguous existence, but the manner of it, that makes form; and this can be determined only by a positive force, which is even opposed to separateness, and subordinates the manifoldness of the parts to the unity of one idea—from the force that works in the crystal to the force which, comparable to a gentle magnetic current, gives to the particles of matter in the human form that position and arrangement among themselves, through which the idea, the essential unity and beauty, can become visible.

Not only, however, as active principle, but as spirit and effective science, must the essence appear to us in the form, in order that we may truly apprehend it. For all unity must be spiritual in nature and origin; and what is the aim of all investigation of Nature but to find science therein? For that wherein there is no Understanding cannot be the object of Understanding; the Unknowing cannot be known. The science by which Nature works is not, however, like human science, connected with reflection upon itself; in it, the conception is not separate from the act, nor the design from the execution. Therefore, rude matter strives, as it were, blindly, after regular shape, and unknowingly assumes pure stereometric forms, which belong, nevertheless, to the realm of ideas, and are something spiritual in the material.

The sublimest arithmetic and geometry are innate in the stars, and unconsciously displayed by them in their motions. More distinctly, but still beyond their grasp, the living cognition appears in animals; and thus we see them, though wandering about without reflection, bring about innumerable results far more excellent than themselves: the bird that, intoxicated with music, transcends itself in soul-like tones; the little artistic creature, that, without practise or instruction, accomplishes light works of architecture; but all directed by an overpowering spirit, that lightens in them already with single flashes of knowledge, but as yet appears nowhere as the full sun, as in Man.

This formative science in Nature and Art is the link that connects idea and form, body and soul. Before everything stands an eternal idea, formed in the Infinite Understanding; but by what means does this idea pass into actuality and embodiment? Only through the creative science that is as necessarily connected with the Infinite Understanding, as in the artist the principle that seizes the idea of unsensuous Beauty is linked with that which sets it forth to the senses.

If that artist be called happy and praiseworthy before all to whom the gods have granted this creative spirit, then that work of art will appear excellent which shows to us, as in outline, this unadulterated energy of creation and activity of Nature.

It was long ago perceived that, in Art, not everything is performed with consciousness; that, with the conscious activity, an unconscious action must combine; and that it is of the perfect unity and mutual interpenetration of the two that the highest in Art is born.

Works that want this seal of unconscious science are recognized by the evident absence of life self-supported and independent of the producer; as, on the contrary, where this acts, Art imparts to its work, together with the utmost clearness to the understanding, that unfathomable reality wherein it resembles a work of Nature.