before your eyes. Do not lay them aside until you have made up your minds. Do not, O, do not allow yourselves to relax by trusting in others or in anything whatever that lies outside yourselves, nor yet by the foolish wisdom of the time, which holds that the ages make themselves, without any human aid, by means of some unknown force. These addresses have not grown weary of impressing upon you that nothing whatever can help you except yourselves; and they find it necessary to repeat it up to the last moment. It may be that rain and dew and fruitful or unfruitful seasons are made by a force unknown to us and not in our power; but all human relationships, the whole special province of man, are made only by men themselves and by absolutely no power outside them. Only when they are all equally blind and ignorant do they fall victims to this hidden power; but it rests with them not to be blind and ignorant. It is true that the degree of evil, be it greater or less, which will befall us may depend partly on that unknown power; but it will depend very specially on the understanding and good will of those to whom we are subjected. But whether it will ever go well with us again depends entirely on ourselves; and it is certain that no well-being whatever will come to us again unless we procure it for ourselves, and especially unless each one of us, in his own way, acts and works as if he were alone, and as if upon him alone depended the salvation of generations to come.
221. This is what you have to do. These addresses solemnly appeal to you to do it without delay.
To you, young men, they solemnly appeal. I, who have long ceasecTTo" belong to your ranks, am of the opinion, which I have expressed in these addresses, that you are even more capable than others of any thought that lies outside the common round, and more susceptible 256 ADDRESSES TO THE GERMAN NATION to all that is good and vigorous, because your age lies nearer to the years of childlike innocence and of nature. Quite otherwise is this trait in you regarded by the majority of the older world. They accuse you of arrogance, of hasty and presumptuous judgment exceeding your powers, of always thinking yourselves in the right, of a mania for innovation. Yet they only smile good-humouredly at these failings of yours. All this, they think, is founded solely on your lack of knowledge of the world — that is to say, of the general state of human corruption; for they have no eyes for anything else in the world. You have courage now, they think, only because you hope to find helpers of like mind, and do not know the grim and stiff-necked resistance which will be offered to your plans for the better. Just wait a little while, they say; when once the youthful fire of your imagination has died away, when you have come to learn the general state of selfishness, sloth- fulness, and dislike for work, when you yourselves have once properly tasted the sweetness of going on in an accus tomed groove, then the desire and the will to be better and cleverer than all the rest will depart from you. This good hope which they have of you is not based on thin air; they have found it confirmed in their own person. They must confess that in the days of their foolish youth they dreamed of improving the world, just as you do now; nevertheless, as they grew more mature they became as tame and peaceful as you see them at present. I believe them; I have myself, even in my own not very long experience, seen young men, who at first aroused other hopes, none the less at a later stage fully come up to the well-meaning expectations of this age of maturity. Do this no longer, young men; for if you do, how can a better generation ever begin? The glow of youth will, it is true, fall from you, and the flame of your imagina- CONCLUSION 257 live power will cease to find nourishment in itself; but seize this flame and concentrate it by clear thinking, make the art of such thinking your very own and you will have added unto you the finest equipment of man, which is character. In and by that clear thinking main tain the source of the eternal bloom of youth; however much your body may grow old or your knees tremble, your mind will re-create itself in ever-renewed freshness, and your character will stand fast and upright. Embrace at once the opportunity that here presents itself to you; think clearly over the subject that is proffered to you for reflection; the clearness that has dawned for you on this one point will gradually spread itself over all the, others too.
222. These addresses appeal solemnly to you, old men. You have just heard what people think of you; they say it to your face, and I, the speaker, frankly add thereto for myself that, with regard to the great majority among you, apart from the exceptions which are undoubtedly not rare and which are all the more worthy of honour, what people say is entirely justified. Go through the history of the last two or three decades; everyone except you yourselves is agreed (and even among yourselves each one is agreed except as regards the special branch with which he himself is concerned) that, always apart from the exceptions and with reference only to the majority, in every branch, in science as well as in the affairs of life, more inefficiency and selfishness was found among the older men than anywhere else. The whole contemporary world looked on and saw how every man that wished for a better and more perfect state of things had to fight, not only against his own lack of clearness and his other environment — his greatest fight was against you; the world saw that you had firmly resolved that nothing must 17 258 ADDRESSES TO THE GERMAN NATION come to the front which you had not known about or done, that you regarded every stirring of thought as an insult to your intelligence, and that you left no power unused by which you might become the victors in this fight against the better, as indeed you were generally the victors. Thus, you were the force which held up all the improvements which kindly nature offered to us from her ever-youthful lap, until you were gathered to the dust (dust that you were already!), and the younger generation in the war with you had become like you and took over your old way of administration. You only need to act now as you have hitherto acted in regard to all proposals for improvement; you only need to put higher than the common weal your vanity in regarding it as a point of honour that there shall be nothing under heaven that you have not already discovered; then, by this last fight you will be spared any further fighting; no improvement will take place, but deterioration will follow on deterioration, so that you will still have many an occasion to rejoice.
I do not want you to think that I despise old age as such, or run it down. If only the source of original life and of its continued movement has by means of freedom been taken up into life, clearness grows, and power with it, so long as life lasts. Such a life becomes better as it is lived, the clay of its earthly origin falling away more and more; it ennobles itself and reaches upwards towards eternal life and blossoms out to meet it. In such a life experience does not reconcile itself to evil, but only makes clearer the means, and brings more skill in the art, of fighting evil triumphantly. For the deterioration due to increasing age, the times we live in are solely to blame; such deterioration must be the result wherever society is very corrupt. It is not nature that corrupts us; nature CONCLUSION 259 CONCLUSION 259 creates us in innocence; society corrupts us. He who once surrenders himself to its influence must in the nature of things become worse and worse, the longer he is exposed to this influence. It would be worth while to examine from this point of view the history of other ages that have been very corrupt, and to see, for example, whether under the government of the Roman emperors what was bad did not become worse and worse with increasing age.
So, among you old men and men of experience it is first to those who form the exception that these addresses solemnly appeal. Support, strengthen, and give counsel in this matter to the younger generation who reverently direct their gaze towards you. But to you others who form the majority the solemn appeal of these addresses is this: you are not asked to help, but just for this once do not interfere; do not put yourselves in the way, as you have always done hitherto, with your wisdom and your thousand grave objections. This matter, like every other matter of reason in the world, has not a thousand aspects, but only one; and that is one of the thousand things you do not know. If your wisdom could bring salvation, it would have saved us before this, for it is you who have advised us hitherto. That is now, like every thing else, in vain, and shall not be brought up against you any more. But learn at long last to know yourselves, and be silent.
223. These addresses appeal solemnly to you, men of business. With few exceptions you have hitherto been at heart hostile to abstract thought, and to every science that wished to be something for its own sake, although you put on an air of superiority and treated all that sort of thing with contempt. You kept the men who pursued such subjects, and the proposals they made, as far from 26o ADDRESSES TO THE GERMAN NATION you as you possibly could; to be called lunatics, or advised to betake themselves to a madhouse, was the thanks they could most generally reckon on getting from you. They for their part did not dare to express them selves about you with the same frankness, because they were dependent on you; but, in their inmost hearts, their true opinion of you was this, that with few exceptions you are shallow babblers and puffed-up braggarts, half- educated men who merely ran through a course at school, blind men who have to feel their way and creep along in the old groove, and who neither want nor are capable of anything else. By your actions convict them of lying. For this purpose seize the opportunity now offered to you; lay aside your contempt of profound thought and science; let yourselves be told what you do not know, then listen and learn; otherwise your accusers will carry their point.
224. These addresses appeal solemnly to you, thinkers, scholars, and men of letters, to such of you as are still worthy of the name. The reproach that men of affairs brought against you was in a certain sense not unjust. Often you went on in the sphere of pure thought too unconcernedly, without troubling yourselves about the actual world, or trying to find out how the two might be brought into connection; you described your own world, and left the actual one too much alone, despising and scorning it. It is true that all regulation and formation of actual life must proceed from a higher regulating idea, and that going along in the accustomed way is not enough; that is an eternal truth, and in God's name crushes with unconcealed contempt everyone who dares to occupy him self with affairs without knowing this. Nevertheless, between the idea and the act of introducing it into every separate form of life there lies a great gulf. To fill up CONCLUSION 261 CONCLUSION 261 this gulf is not only the work of the man of affairs, who indeed must previously have learnt enough to be able to understand you, but the work also of you, who in the world of thought must not forget life. At this point both of you meet. Instead of looking askance at each other across the gulf and depreciating each other, rather let each party be zealous to fill up the gulf from his side and so pave the way to union. Finally, comprehend that both of you are as necessary to each other as head and arm are necessary to each other.
These addresses appeal solemnly in other respects as well to you, thinkers, scholars, and men of letters, to such of you as are still worthy of the name. Your complaints about the general shallowness, thoughtlessness, and vagueness, about conceitedness and the inexhaustible flow of idle chatter, about the contempt for seriousness and thorough ness that prevail in all classes, may be true, as indeed they are. But then, what class is it which has brought up all these classes, which has turned everything scientific into a game for them, and has trained them from their earliest youth to that conceitedness and idle chatter? Who is it that continues to instruct the generations that have left school? The most obvious cause of the stupidity of the age is that it has read itself stupid with the works which you have written. Why do you, nevertheless, continue to make it your business to keep such indolent people entertained, regardless of the fact that they have learnt nothing and want to learn nothing? Why do you call them " the public," flatter them by making them your judges, set them on against your rivals, and seek by every means to win over this blind and confused mob to your side? Finally, why do you give them, even in your reviewing establishments and journals, not only the material, but also the model for their hasty judgments, by 262 ADDRESSES TO THE GERMAN NATION delivering judgment yourselves as the fancy seizes you, without any connecting principle and usually without taste, in a way that the meanest of your readers could equal? If you do not all think like this, if even yet there are better-disposed writers among you, why do they not unite to put an end to the evil? Especially with refer ence to our men of business; they ran through a course at school under you; you say it yourselves. Why did you not make use of the time they spent with you to instil into them at any rate some silent respect for the sciences, and especially to shatter betimes the conceit of high-born youths and to show them that, when it comes to thinking, neither rank nor birth are of any avail? If perchance even at that time you flattered them and gave them prominence beyond their merits, you must now bear the burden of what you yourselves have created.
They are willing to pardon you, these addresses, on the assumption that you had not grasped the importance of your business; they solemnly appeal to you to make yourselves acquainted from this very hour with its impor tance, and no longer to carry it on as if it were merely a trade. Learn to respect yourselves, show by your actions that you do so, and the world will respect you. The first proof of it you will give by the influence you yourselves exert on the resolution that is here proposed, and by the way in which you conduct yourselves in connection therewith.
225. These addresses appeal solemnly to you, princes of Germany. Those who in their dealings with you act as if no one ought to say anything whatever to you, or could have occasion to say anything, are contemptible flatterers; they wickedly slander you and no one else; put them far from you. The truth is that you are born just as ignorant as all the rest of us, and that you must CONCLUSION 263 listen and learn just as we must, if you are to emerge from this state of natural ignorance. Your share in bringing about the fate that has befallen you together with your peoples has been stated here in the mildest and, we believe, the only just and equitable way; and unless you are willing to listen to flattery only, but never to the truth, you can have no complaint to make against these addresses. Let all this be forgotten, in the same way that all the rest of us wish that our share of the blame may be forgotten. For you too, as for all of us, a new life now begins. O, that this voice of mine might penetrate to you through the whole environment which is wont to make you inaccessible! With proud self-reliance it may say to you: you rule over peoples more loyal, more docile, more worthy of happiness than any princes have ever ruled over in any age or any nation. They have a sense of freedom and a capacity for it; but they followed you into a bloody war against what seemed to them freedom, because you willed it. Some among you willed otherwise later, and they followed you into what must have seemed to them a war of extirpation against one of the last remnants of German independence and autonomy, again because you willed it so. Since then they have been bearing and enduring the oppressive burden of our common woes; and they cease not to be loyal to you, to cleave to you with intense devotion, and to love you as their divinely appointed guardians. If you could only observe them without their knowing it; if you could only escape from that environment, which does not always present the loveliest aspect of humanity to you, and descend into the houses of the citizen and the cottages of the peasant, there to follow and reflect upon the quiet and secluded life of these classes of society, with whom the qualities of loyalty and uprightness, so rare now among the upper 264 ADDRESSES TO THE GERMAN NATION classes, seem to have taken refuge; O, then, beyond a doubt you would be filled with a resolve to think more earnestly than ever how help might be brought to them. These addresses have suggested to you a means of help which they deem certain, thoroughgoing, and decisive. Let your counsellors take counsel among themselves as to whether they too are of this opinion, or whether they know a better means; only it must be equally decisive. But the conviction that something must happen, and must happen without delay, and that something thorough going and decisive must happen, and that the time for half-measures and temporary expedients is over, this conviction I would have these addresses bring forth in you yourselves, if they can, seeing that they still have the greatest confidence in your uprightness.
226. To all you Germans, whatever position you may occupy in society, these addresses solemnly appeal; let every one of you, who can think, think first of all about the subject here suggested, and let each do for it what lies nearest to him individually in the position he occupies.
227. Your forefathers unite themselves with these addresses, and make a solemn appeal to you. Think that in my voice there are mingled the voices of your ancestors of the hoary past, who with their own bodies stemmed the onrush of Roman world-dominion, who with their blood won the independence of those mountains, plains, and rivers which under you have fallen a prey to the foreigner. They call to you: " Act for us; let the memory of us which you hand on to posterity be just as honourable and without reproach as it was when it came to you, when you took pride in it and in your descent from us. Until now, the resistance we made has been regarded as great and wise and noble; we seemed CONCLUSION 265 CONCLUSION 265 the consecrated and the inspired in the divine world- purpose. If our race dies out with you, our honour will be turned to shame and our wisdom to foolishness. Fof if, indeed, the German stock is to be swallowed up in Roman civilization, it were better that it had fallen before the Rome of old than before a Rome of to-day. The former we resisted and conquered; by the latter you have been ground to dust. Seeing that this is so, you shall now not conquer them with temporal weapons; your spirit alone shall rise up against them and stand erect. To you has fallen the greater destiny, to found the empire of the spirit and of reason, and completely to annihilate the rule of brute physical force in the world. If you do this, then you are worthy of your descent from us."
us."
228. Then, too, there mingle with these voices the spirits of your more recent forefathers, those who fell in the holy war for the freedom of belief and of religion. " Save our honour too," they cry to you. " To us it was not entirely clear what we fought for; besides the lawful resolve not to let ourselves be dictated to by exter nal force in matters of conscience, there was another and a higher spirit driving us, which never fully revealed itself to us. To you it is revealed, this spirit, if you have the power of vision in the spiritual world; it beholds you with eyes clear and sublime. The varied and confused mixture of sensuous and spiritual motives that has hitherto ruled the world shall be displaced, and spirit alone, pure and freed from all sensuous motives, shall take the helm of human affairs. It was in order that this spirit might have freedom to develop and grow to independent existence — it was for this that we poured forth our blood. It is for you to justify and give meaning to our sacrifice, by setting this spirit to fulfil its purpose and to rule the 266 ADDRESSES TO THE GERMAN NATION world. If this does not come about as the final goal to which the whole previous development of our nation has been tending, then the battles we fought will turn out to be a vain and fleeting farce, and the freedom of conscience and of spirit that we won is a vain word, if from now onwards spirit and conscience are to be no more."
229. There comes a solemn appeal to you from your descendants not yet born. " You boast of your fore fathers," they cry to you, " and link yourselves with pride to a noble line. Take care that the chain does not break off with you; see to it that we, too, may boast of you and use you as an unsullied link to connect ourselves with the same illustrious line. Do not force us to be ashamed of our descent from you as from base and slavish barbarians; do not compel us to conceal our origin, or to fabricate a strange one and to take a strange name, lest we be at once and without further examina tion rejected and trodden underfoot. As the next generation that proceeds from you turns out to be, so will your reputation be in history; honourable, if they bear honourable witness for you, but disgraceful even beyond your due, if your descendants may not speak for you, and the conqueror makes your history. Never yet has a conqueror had sufficient inclination or sufficient knowledge to judge the conquered justly. The more he depreciates them, the more just does he himself stand out. Who can know what great deeds, what excellent institutions, what noble customs of many a people in the ancient world have fallen into oblivion, because their descendants were forced under the yoke, while the conqueror wrote an account of them that suited his purpose, and there was none to contradict him! " 230. A solemn appeal comes to you even from foreign CONCLUSION 267 countries, in so far as they still understand themselves even to the slightest extent, and still have an eye for their true advantage. Yea, in all nations there are still some souls who cannot even yet believe that the great promises of a realm of justice, reason, and truth for the human race are vain and naught but a baseless delu- i sion, and who, therefore, assume that the present age of iron is but a transition to a better state. These souls, and in them the whole of modern humanity, count upon you. A large part of modern humanity is descended • from us, and the rest have received from us their religion i and all their civilization. The former solemnly appeal to us by the soil of our common fatherland, which was their cradle, too, and which they have left free for us, the latter by the culture they have received from us as the pledge of a loftier bliss — both appeal to us to preserve ourselves for them too and for their sake, just as we have always been, and not to let the whole organism of the new race that has arisen be violently deprived of this member so important to it; so that, when they come to need our counsel, our example, and our co-operation in striving towards the true goal of earthly life, they will not miss us,