to their pain.
231. All ages, all wise and good men who have ever breathed upon this earth, all their thoughts and intuitions of something loftier, mingle with these voices and sur round you and lift up imploring hands to you; even, if one may say so, providence and the divine plan in creat ing a race of men, a plan which exists only to be thought out by men and to be brought by men into the actual world — the divine plan, I say, solemnly appeals to you to save its honour and its existence. Whether those were right who believed that mankind must always grow better, and that thoughts of a true order and worth of man 268 ADDRESSES TO THE GERMAN NATION were no idle dreams, but the prophecy and pledge of the real world that is to be — whether they are to be proved right, or those who continue to slumber in an animal and vegetable existence and mock at every flight into higher worlds — to give a final and decisive judgment on this point is a work for you. The old world with its glory and its greatness, as well as its defects, has fallen by its own unworthiness and by the violence of your fathers. If there is truth in what has been expounded in these addresses, then are you of all modern peoples the one in whom the seed of human perfection most unmistakably lies, and to whom the lead in its development is committed. If you perish in this your essential nature, then there perishes together with you every hope of the whole human race for salvation from the depths of its miseries. Do not console yourselves with an opinion based on thin air and depending on the mere recurrence of cases that have already happened; do not hope that when the old civilization has fallen a new one will arise once more out of a semi-barbarous nation on the ruins of the first. In ancient times there was such a people in existence, equipped with every requirement for such a destiny and quite well known to the civilized people, who have left us their description of it; and they themselves, if they had been able to imagine their own downfall, would have been able to discover in this people the means of recon struction. To us also the whole surface of the globe is quite well known and all the peoples that dwell thereon. But do we know a people akin to the ancestral stock of the modern world, of whom we may have the same expectation? I think that everyone who does not merely base his hopes and beliefs on idle dreaming, but investi gates thoroughly and thinks, will be bound to answer this question with a NO. There is, therefore, no way out; CONCLUSION 269 if you go under, all humanity goes under with you, with out hope of any future restoration.
This it was, gentlemen, which at the end of these addresses I wanted and was bound to impress upon you, who to me are the representatives of the nation, and through you upon the whole nation.
FINIS PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY NEILL AND CO., LTD., EDINBURGH 0 MAR 22 197?
DD Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 199 Addresses to the German F533 nation PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE CARDS OR SLIPS FROM THIS POCKET UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY