Make of yourselves a mirror where the future may see itself, and forget the superst.i.tion that you are Epigoni. You have enough to ponder and find out, in pondering the life of the future: but do not ask history to show you the means and the instrument to it. If you live yourselves back into the history of great men, you will find in it the high command to come to maturity and leave that blighting system of cultivation offered by your time: which sees its own profit in not allowing you to become ripe, that it may use and dominate you while you are yet unripe. And if you want biographies, do not look for those with the legend "Mr. So-and-so and his times," but for one whose t.i.tle-page might be inscribed "a fighter against his time."
Feast your souls on Plutarch, and dare to believe in yourselves when you believe in his heroes. A hundred such men--educated against the fashion of to-day, made familiar with the heroic, and come to maturity--are enough to give an eternal quietus to the noisy sham education of this time.
VII.
The unrestrained historical sense, pushed to its logical extreme, uproots the future, because it destroys illusions and robs existing things of the only atmosphere in which they can live. Historical justice, even if practised conscientiously, with a pure heart, is therefore a dreadful virtue, because it always undermines and ruins the living thing: its judgment always means annihilation. If there be no constructive impulse behind the historical one, if the clearance of rubbish be not merely to leave the ground free for the hopeful living future to build its house, if justice alone be supreme, the creative instinct is sapped and discouraged. A religion, for example, that has to be turned into a matter of historical knowledge by the power of pure justice, and to be scientifically studied throughout, is destroyed at the end of it all. For the historical audit brings so much to light which is false and absurd, violent and inhuman, that the condition of pious illusion falls to pieces. And a thing can only live through a pious illusion. For man is creative only through love and in the shadow of love"s illusions, only through the unconditional belief in perfection and righteousness. Everything that forces a man to be no longer unconditioned in his love, cuts at the root of his strength: he must wither, and be dishonoured. Art has the opposite effect to history: and only perhaps if history suffer transformation into a pure work of art, can it preserve instincts or arouse them.
Such history would be quite against the a.n.a.lytical and inartistic tendencies of our time, and even be considered false. But the history that merely destroys without any impulse to construct, will in the long-run make its instruments tired of life; for such men destroy illusions, and "he who destroys illusions in himself and others is punished by the ultimate tyrant, Nature." For a time a man can take up history like any other study, and it will be perfectly harmless.
Recent theology seems to have entered quite innocently into partnership with history, and scarcely sees even now that it has unwittingly bound itself to the Voltairean _ecrasez_! No one need expect from that any new and powerful constructive impulse: they might as well have let the so-called Protestant Union serve as the cradle of a new religion, and the jurist Holtzendorf, the editor of the far more dubiously named Protestant Bible, be its John the Baptist. This state of innocence may be continued for some time by the Hegelian philosophy,--still seething in some of the older heads,--by which men can distinguish the "idea of Christianity" from its various imperfect "manifestations"; and persuade themselves that it is the "self-movement of the Idea" that is ever particularising itself in purer and purer forms, and at last becomes the purest, most transparent, in fact scarcely visible form in the brain of the present _theologus liberalis vulgaris_. But to listen to this pure Christianity speaking its mind about the earlier impure Christianity, the uninitiated hearer would often get the impression that the talk was not of Christianity at all but of ...--what are we to think? if we find Christianity described by the "greatest theologians of the century" as the religion that claims to "find itself in all real religions and some other barely possible religions," and if the "true church" is to be a thing "which may become a liquid ma.s.s with no fixed outline, with no fixed place for its different parts, but everything to be peacefully welded together"--what, I ask again, are we to think?
Christianity has been denaturalised by historical treatment--which in its most complete form means "just" treatment--until it has been resolved into pure knowledge and destroyed in the process. This can be studied in everything that has life. For it ceases to have life if it be perfectly dissected, and lives in pain and anguish as soon as the historical dissection begins. There are some who believe in the saving power of German music to revolutionise the German nature. They angrily exclaim against the special injustice done to our culture, when such men as Mozart and Beethoven are beginning to be spattered with the learned mud of the biographers and forced to answer a thousand searching questions on the rack of historical criticism. Is it not premature death, or at least mutilation, for anything whose living influence is not yet exhausted, when men turn their curious eyes to the little minutiae of life and art, and look for problems of knowledge where one ought to learn to live, and forget problems? Set a couple of these modern biographers to consider the origins of Christianity or the Lutheran reformation: their sober, practical investigations would be quite sufficient to make all spiritual "action at a distance" impossible: just as the smallest animal can prevent the growth of the mightiest oak by simply eating up the acorn. All living things need an atmosphere, a mysterious mist, around them. If that veil be taken away and a religion, an art, or a genius condemned to revolve like a star without an atmosphere, we must not be surprised if it becomes hard and unfruitful, and soon withers. It is so with all great things "that never prosper without some illusion," as Hans Sachs says in the Meistersinger.
Every people, every man even, who would become ripe, needs such a veil of illusion, such a protecting cloud. But now men hate to become ripe, for they honour history above life. They cry in triumph that "science is now beginning to rule life." Possibly it might; but a life thus ruled is not of much value. It is not such true _life_, and promises much less for the future than the life that used to be guided not by science, but by instincts and powerful illusions. But this is not to be the age of ripe, alert and harmonious personalities, but of work that may be of most use to the commonwealth. Men are to be fashioned to the needs of the time, that they may soon take their place in the machine. They must work in the factory of the "common good" before they are ripe, or rather to prevent them becoming ripe; for this would be a luxury that would draw away a deal of power from the "labour market." Some birds are blinded that they may sing better; I do not think men sing to-day better than their grandfathers, though I am sure they are blinded early. But light, too clear, too sudden and dazzling, is the infamous means used to blind them. The young man is kicked through all the centuries: boys who know nothing of war, diplomacy, or commerce are considered fit to be introduced to political history. We moderns also run through art galleries and hear concerts in the same way as the young man runs through history. We can feel that one thing sounds differently from another, and p.r.o.nounce on the different "effects."
And the power of gradually losing all feelings of strangeness or astonishment, and finally being pleased at anything, is called the historical sense, or historical culture. The crowd of influences streaming on the young soul is so great, the clods of barbarism and violence flung at him so strange and overwhelming, that an a.s.sumed stupidity is his only refuge. Where there is a subtler and stronger self-consciousness we find another emotion too--disgust. The young man has become homeless: he doubts all ideas, all moralities. He knows "it was different in every age, and what you are does not matter." In a heavy apathy he lets opinion on opinion pa.s.s by him, and understands the meaning of Holderlin"s words when he read the work of Diogenes Laertius on the lives and doctrines of the Greek philosophers: "I have seen here too what has often occurred to me, that the change and waste in men"s thoughts and systems is far more tragic than the fates that overtake what men are accustomed to call the only realities." No, such study of history bewilders and overwhelms. It is not necessary for youth, as the ancients show, but even in the highest degree dangerous, as the moderns show. Consider the historical student, the heir of ennui, that appears even in his boyhood. He has the "methods" for original work, the "correct ideas"
and the airs of the master at his fingers" ends. A little isolated period of the past is marked out for sacrifice. He cleverly applies his method, and produces something, or rather, in prouder phrase, "creates" something. He becomes a "servant of truth" and a ruler in the great domain of history. If he was what they call ripe as a boy, he is now over-ripe. You only need shake him and wisdom will rattle down into your lap; but the wisdom is rotten, and every apple has its worm. Believe me, if men work in the factory of science and have to make themselves useful before they are really ripe, science is ruined as much as the slaves who have been employed too soon. I am sorry to use the common jargon about slave-owners and taskmasters in respect of such conditions, that might be thought free from any economic taint: but the words "factory, labour-market, auction-sale, practical use," and all the auxiliaries of egoism, come involuntarily to the lips in describing the younger generation of savants. Successful mediocrity tends to become still more mediocre, science still more "useful." Our modern savants are only wise on one subject, in all the rest they are, to say the least, different from those of the old stamp. In spite of that they demand honour and profit for themselves, as if the state and public opinion were bound to take the new coinage for the same value as the old. The carters have made a trade-compact among themselves, and settled that genius is superfluous, for every carrier is being re-stamped as one. And probably a later age will see that their edifices are only carted together and not built. To those who have ever on their lips the modern cry of battle and sacrifice--"Division of labour! fall into line!" we may say roundly: "If you try to further the progress of science as quickly as possible, you will end by destroying it as quickly as possible; just as the hen is worn out which you force to lay too many eggs." The progress of science has been amazingly rapid in the last decade; but consider the savants, those exhausted hens. They are certainly not "harmonious" natures: they can merely cackle more than before, because they lay eggs oftener: but the eggs are always smaller, though their books are bigger. The natural result of it all is the favourite "popularising" of science (or rather its feminising and infantising), the villainous habit of cutting the cloth of science to fit the figure of the "general public." Goethe saw the abuse in this, and demanded that science should only influence the outer world by way of _a n.o.bler ideal of action_. The older generation of savants had good reason for thinking this abuse an oppressive burden: the modern savants have an equally good reason for welcoming it, because, leaving their little corner of knowledge out of account, they are part of the "general public" themselves, and its needs are theirs.
They only require to take themselves less seriously to be able to open their little kingdom successfully to popular curiosity. This easy-going behaviour is called "the modest condescension of the savant to the people"; whereas in reality he has only "descended" to himself, so far as he is not a savant but a plebeian. Rise to the conception of a people, you learned men; you can never have one n.o.ble or high enough. If you thought much of the people, you would have compa.s.sion towards them, and shrink from offering your historical aquafortis as a refreshing drink. But you really think very little of them, for you dare not take any reasonable pains for their future; and you act like practical pessimists, men who feel the coming catastrophe and become indifferent and careless of their own and others" existence. "If only the earth last for us: and if it do not last, it is no matter." Thus they come to live an _ironical_ existence.
VIII.
It may seem a paradox, though it is none, that I should attribute a kind of "ironical self-consciousness" to an age that is generally so honestly, and clamorously, vain of its historical training; and should see a suspicion hovering near it that there is really nothing to be proud of, and a fear lest the time for rejoicing at historical knowledge may soon have gone by. Goethe has shown a similar riddle in man"s nature, in his remarkable study of Newton: he finds a "troubled feeling of his own error" at the base--or rather on the height--of his being, just as if he was conscious at times of having a deeper insight into things, that vanished the moment after. This gave him a certain ironical view of his own nature. And one finds that the greater and more developed "historical men" are conscious of all the superst.i.tion and absurdity in the belief that a people"s education need be so extremely historical as it is; the mightiest nations, mightiest in action and influence, have lived otherwise, and their youth has been trained otherwise. The knowledge gives a sceptical turn to their minds. "The absurdity and superst.i.tion," these sceptics say, "suit men like ourselves, who come as the latest withered shoots of a gladder and mightier stock, and fulfil Hesiod"s prophecy, that men will one day be born gray-headed, and that Zeus will destroy that generation as soon as the sign be visible." Historical culture is really a kind of inherited grayness, and those who have borne its mark from childhood must believe instinctively in _the old age of mankind_. To old age belongs the old man"s business of looking back and casting up his accounts, of seeking consolation in the memories of the past,--in historical culture. But the human race is tough and persistent, and will not admit that the lapse of a thousand years, or a hundred thousand, ent.i.tles any one to sum up its progress from the past to the future; that is, it will not be observed as a whole at all by that infinitesimal atom, the individual man. What is there in a couple of thousand years--the period of thirty-four consecutive human lives of sixty years each--to make us speak of youth at the beginning, and "the old age of mankind" at the end of them? Does not this paralysing belief in a fast-fading humanity cover the misunderstanding of a theological idea, inherited from the Middle Ages, that the end of the world is approaching and we are waiting anxiously for the judgment? Does not the increasing demand for historical judgment give us that idea in a new dress? as if our time were the latest possible time, and commanded to hold that universal judgment of the past, which the Christian never expected from a man, but from "the Son of Man." The _memento mori_, spoken to humanity as well as the individual, was a sting that never ceased to pain, the crown of mediaeval knowledge and consciousness.
The opposite message of a later time, _memento vivere_, is spoken rather timidly, without the full power of the lungs; and there is something almost dishonest about it. For mankind still keeps to its _memento mori_, and shows it by the universal need for history; science may flap its wings as it will, it has never been able to gain the free air. A deep feeling of hopelessness has remained, and taken the historical colouring that has now darkened and depressed all higher education. A religion that, of all the hours of man"s life, thinks the last the most important, that has prophesied the end of earthly life and condemned all creatures to live in the fifth act of a tragedy, may call forth the subtlest and n.o.blest powers of man, but it is an enemy to all new planting, to all bold attempts or free aspirations. It opposes all flight into the unknown, because it has no life or hope there itself. It only lets the new bud press forth on sufferance, to blight it in its own good time: "it might lead life astray and give it a false value." What the Florentines did under the influence of Savonarola"s exhortations, when they made the famous holocaust of pictures, ma.n.u.scripts, masks and mirrors, Christianity would like to do with every culture that allured to further effort and bore that _memento vivere_ on its standard. And if it cannot take the direct way--the way of main force--it gains its end all the same by allying itself with historical culture, though generally without its connivance; and speaking through its mouth, turns away every fresh birth with a shrug of its shoulders, and makes us feel all the more that we are late-comers and Epigoni, that we are, in a word, born with gray hair. The deep and serious contemplation of the unworthiness of all past action, of the world ripe for judgment, has been whittled down to the sceptical consciousness that it is anyhow a good thing to know all that has happened, as it is too late to do anything better. The historical sense makes its servants pa.s.sive and retrospective. Only in moments of forgetfulness, when that sense is dormant, does the man who is sick of the historical fever ever act; though he only a.n.a.lyses his deed again after it is over (which prevents it from having any further consequences), and finally puts it on the dissecting table for the purposes of history. In this sense we are still living in the Middle Ages, and history is still a disguised theology; just as the reverence with which the unlearned layman looks on the learned cla.s.s is inherited through the clergy.
What men gave formerly to the Church they give now, though in smaller measure, to science. But the fact of giving at all is the work of the Church, not of the modern spirit, which among its other good qualities has something of the miser in it, and is a bad hand at the excellent virtue of liberality.
These words may not be very acceptable, any more than my derivation of the excess of history from the mediaeval _memento mori_ and the hopelessness that Christianity bears in its heart towards all future ages of earthly existence. But you should always try to replace my hesitating explanations by a better one. For the origin of historical culture, and of its absolutely radical antagonism to the spirit of a new time and a "modern consciousness," must itself be known by a historical process. History must solve the problem of history, science must turn its sting against itself. This threefold "must" is the imperative of the "new spirit," if it is really to contain something new, powerful, vital and original. Or is it true that we Germans--to leave the Romance nations out of account--must always be mere "followers" in all the higher reaches of culture, because that is all we _can_ be? The words of Wilhelm Wackernagel are well worth pondering: "We Germans are a nation of "followers," and with all our higher science and even our faith, are merely the successors of the ancient world. Even those who are opposed to it are continually breathing the immortal spirit of cla.s.sical culture with that of Christianity: and if any one could separate these two elements from the living air surrounding the soul of man, there would not be much remaining for a spiritual life to exist on." Even if we would rest content with our vocation to follow antiquity, even if we decided to take it in an earnest and strenuous spirit and to show our high prerogative in our earnestness,--we should yet be compelled to ask whether it were our eternal destiny to be pupils of a fading antiquity. We might be allowed at some time to put our aim higher and further above us. And after congratulating ourselves on having brought that secondary spirit of Alexandrian culture in us to such marvellous productiveness--through our "universal history"--we might go on to place before us, as our n.o.blest prize, the still higher task of striving beyond and above this Alexandrian world; and bravely find our prototypes in the ancient Greek world, where all was great, natural and human. But it is just _there_ that we find the reality of a true unhistorical culture--and in spite of that, or perhaps because of it, an unspeakably rich and vital culture. Were we Germans nothing but followers, we could not be anything greater or prouder than the lineal inheritors and followers of such a culture.
This however must be added. The thought of being Epigoni, that is often a torture, can yet create a spring of hope for the future, to the individual as well as the people: so far, that is, as we can regard ourselves as the heirs and followers of the marvellous cla.s.sical power, and see therein both our honour and our spur. But not as the late and bitter fruit of a powerful stock, giving that stock a further spell of cold life, as antiquaries and grave-diggers.
Such late-comers live truly an ironical existence. Annihilation follows their halting walk on tiptoe through life. They shudder before it in the midst of their rejoicing over the past. They are living memories, and their own memories have no meaning; for there are none to inherit them. And thus they are wrapped in the melancholy thought that their life is an injustice, which no future life can set right again.
Suppose that these antiquaries, these late arrivals, were to change their painful ironic modesty for a certain shamelessness. Suppose we heard them saying, aloud, "The race is at its zenith, for it has manifested itself consciously for the first time." We should have a comedy, in which the dark meaning of a certain very celebrated philosophy would unroll itself for the benefit of German culture. I believe there has been no dangerous turning-point in the progress of German culture in this century that has not been made more dangerous by the enormous and still living influence of this Hegelian philosophy. The belief that one is a late-comer in the world is, anyhow, harmful and degrading: but it must appear frightful and devastating when it raises our late-comer to G.o.dhead, by a neat turn of the wheel, as the true meaning and object of all past creation, and his conscious misery is set up as the perfection of the world"s history. Such a point of view has accustomed the Germans to talk of a "world-process," and justify their own time as its necessary result.
And it has put history in the place of the other spiritual powers, art and religion, as the one sovereign; inasmuch as it is the "Idea realising itself," the "Dialectic of the spirit of the nations," and the "tribunal of the world."
History understood in this Hegelian way has been contemptuously called G.o.d"s sojourn upon earth,--though the G.o.d was first created by the history. He, at any rate, became transparent and intelligible inside Hegelian skulls, and has risen through all the dialectically possible steps in his being up to the manifestation of the Self: so that for Hegel the highest and final stage of the world-process came together in his own Berlin existence. He ought to have said that everything after him was merely to be regarded as the musical coda of the great historical rondo,--or rather, as simply superfluous. He has not said it; and thus he has implanted in a generation leavened throughout by him the worship of the "power of history," that practically turns every moment into a sheer gaping at success, into an idolatry of the actual: for which we have now discovered the characteristic phrase "to adapt ourselves to circ.u.mstances." But the man who has once learnt to crook the knee and bow the head before the power of history, nods "yes" at last, like a Chinese doll, to every power, whether it be a government or a public opinion or a numerical majority; and his limbs move correctly as the power pulls the string.
If each success have come by a "rational necessity," and every event show the victory of logic or the "Idea," then--down on your knees quickly, and let every step in the ladder of success have its reverence! There are no more living mythologies, you say? Religions are at their last gasp? Look at the religion of the power of history, and the priests of the mythology of Ideas, with their scarred knees!
Do not all the virtues follow in the train of the new faith? And shall we not call it unselfishness, when the historical man lets himself be turned into an "objective" mirror of all that is? Is it not magnanimity to renounce all power in heaven and earth in order to adore the mere fact of power? Is it not justice, always to hold the balance of forces in your hands and observe which is the stronger and heavier? And what a school of politeness is such a contemplation of the past! To take everything objectively, to be angry at nothing, to love nothing, to understand everything--makes one gentle and pliable.
Even if a man brought up in this school will show himself openly offended, one is just as pleased, knowing it is only meant in the artistic sense of _ira et studium_, though it is really _sine ira et studio_.
What old-fashioned thoughts I have on such a combination of virtue and mythology! But they must out, however one may laugh at them. I would even say that history always teaches--"it was once," and morality--"it ought not to be, or have been." So history becomes a compendium of actual immorality. But how wrong would one be to regard history as the judge of this actual immorality! Morality is offended by the fact that a Raphael had to die at thirty-six; such a being ought not to die. If you came to the help of history, as the apologists of the actual, you would say: "he had spoken everything that was in him to speak, a longer life would only have enabled him to create a similar beauty, and not a new beauty," and so on. Thus you become an _advocatus diaboli_ by setting up the success, the fact, as your idol: whereas the fact is always dull, at all times more like calf than a G.o.d. Your apologies for history are helped by ignorance: for it is only because you do not know what a _natura naturans_ like Raphael is, that you are not on fire when you think it existed once and can never exist again. Some one has lately tried to tell us that Goethe had out-lived himself with his eighty-two years: and yet I would gladly take two of Goethe"s "outlived" years in exchange for whole cartloads of fresh modern lifetimes, to have another set of such conversations as those with Eckermann, and be preserved from all the "modern" talk of these esquires of the moment.
How few living men have a right to live, as against those mighty dead! That the many live and those few live no longer, is simply a brutal truth, that is, a piece of unalterable folly, a blank wall of "it was once so" against the moral judgment "it ought not to have been." Yes, against the moral judgment! For you may speak of what virtue you will, of justice, courage, magnanimity, of wisdom and human compa.s.sion,--you will find the virtuous man will always rise against the blind force of facts, the tyranny of the actual, and submit himself to laws that are not the fickle laws of history. He ever swims against the waves of history, either by fighting his pa.s.sions, as the nearest brute facts of his existence, or by training himself to honesty amid the glittering nets spun round him by falsehood. Were history nothing more than the "all-embracing system of pa.s.sion and error," man would have to read it as Goethe wished Werther to be read;--just as if it called to him, "Be a man and follow me not!" But fortunately history also keeps alive for us the memory of the great "fighters against history," that is, against the blind power of the actual; it puts itself in the pillory just by glorifying the true historical nature in men who troubled themselves very little about the "thus it is," in order that they might follow a "thus it must be" with greater joy and greater pride. Not to drag their generation to the grave, but to found a new one--that is the motive that ever drives them onward; and even if they are born late, there is a way of living by which they can forget it--and future generations will know them only as the first-comers.
IX.
Is perhaps our time such a "first-comer"? Its historical sense is so strong, and has such universal and boundless expression, that future times will commend it, if only for this, as a first-comer--if there be any future time, in the sense of future culture. But here comes a grave doubt. Close to the modern man"s pride there stands his irony about himself, his consciousness that he must live in a historical, or twilit, atmosphere, the fear that he can retain none of his youthful hopes and powers. Here and there one goes further into cynicism, and justifies the course of history, nay, the whole evolution of the world, as simply leading up to the modern man, according to the cynical canon:--"what you see now had to come, man had to be thus and not otherwise, no one can stand against this necessity." He who cannot rest in a state of irony flies for refuge to the cynicism. The last decade makes him a present of one of its most beautiful inventions, a full and well-rounded phrase for this cynicism: he calls his way of living thoughtlessly and after the fashion of his time, "the full surrender of his personality to the world-process." The personality and the world-process! The world-process and the personality of the earthworm! If only one did not eternally hear the word "world, world, world," that hyperbole of all hyperboles; when we should only speak, in a decent manner, of "man, man, man"! Heirs of the Greeks and Romans, of Christianity? All that seems nothing to the cynics. But "heirs of the world-process"; the final target of the world-process; the meaning and solution of all riddles of the universe, the ripest fruit on the tree of knowledge!--that is what I call a right n.o.ble thought: by this token are the firstlings of every time to be known, although they may have arrived last. The historical imagination has never flown so far, even in a dream; for now the history of man is merely the continuation of that of animals and plants: the universal historian finds traces of himself even in the utter depths of the sea, in the living slime. He stands astounded in face of the enormous way that man has run, and his gaze quivers before the mightier wonder, the modern man who can see all this way! He stands proudly on the pyramid of the world-process: and while he lays the final stone of his knowledge, he seems to cry aloud to listening Nature: "We are at the top, we are the top, we are the completion of Nature!"
O thou too proud European of the nineteenth century, art thou not mad? Thy knowledge does not complete Nature, it only kills thine own nature! Measure the height of what thou knowest by the depths of thy power to _do_. Thou climbest the sunbeams of knowledge up towards heaven--but also down to Chaos. Thy manner of going is fatal to thee; the ground slips from under thy feet into the unknown; thy life has no other stay, but only spider"s webs that every new stroke of thy knowledge tears asunder.--But not another serious word about this, for there is a lighter side to it all.
The moralist, the artist, the saint and the statesman may well be troubled, when they see that all foundations are breaking up in mad unconscious ruin, and resolving themselves into the ever flowing stream of becoming; that all creation is being tirelessly spun into webs of history by the modern man, the great spider in the mesh of the world-net. We ourselves may be glad for once in a way that we see it all in the shining magic mirror of a philosophical parodist, in whose brain the time has come to an ironical consciousness of itself, to a point even of wickedness, in Goethe"s phrase. Hegel once said, "when the spirit makes a fresh start, we philosophers are at hand."
Our time did make a fresh start--into irony, and lo! Edward von Hartmann was at hand, with his famous Philosophy of the Unconscious--or, more plainly, his philosophy of unconscious irony.
We have seldom read a more jovial production, a greater philosophical joke than Hartmann"s book. Any one whom it does not fully enlighten about "becoming," who is not swept and garnished throughout by it, is ready to become a monument of the past himself. The beginning and end of the world-process, from the first throb of consciousness to its final leap into nothingness, with the task of our generation settled for it;--all drawn from that clever fount of inspiration, the Unconscious, and glittering in Apocalyptic light, imitating an honest seriousness to the life, as if it were a serious philosophy and not a huge joke,--such a system shows its creator to be one of the first philosophical parodists of all time. Let us then sacrifice on his altar, and offer the inventor of a true universal medicine a lock of hair, in Schleiermacher"s phrase. For what medicine would be more salutary to combat the excess of historical culture than Hartmann"s parody of the world"s history?
If we wished to express in the fewest words what Hartmann really has to tell us from his mephitic tripod of unconscious irony, it would be something like this: our time could only remain as it is, if men should become thoroughly sick of this existence. And I fervently believe he is right. The frightful petrifaction of the time, the restless rattle of the ghostly bones, held navely up to us by David Strauss as the most beautiful fact of all--is justified by Hartmann not only from the past, _ex causis efficientibus_, but also from the future, _ex causa finali_. The rogue let light stream over our time from the last day, and saw that it was very good,--for him, that is, who wishes to feel the indigestibility of life at its full strength, and for whom the last day cannot come quickly enough. True, Hartmann calls the old age of life that mankind is approaching the "old age of man": but that is the blessed state, according to him, where there is only a successful mediocrity; where art is the "evening"s amus.e.m.e.nt of the Berlin financier," and "the time has no more need for geniuses, either because it would be casting pearls before swine, or because the time has advanced beyond the stage where the geniuses are found, to one more important," to that stage of social evolution, in fact, in which every worker "leads a comfortable existence, with hours of work that leave him sufficient leisure to cultivate his intellect." Rogue of rogues, you say well what is the aspiration of present-day mankind: but you know too what a spectre of disgust will arise at the end of this old age of mankind, as the result of the intellectual culture of stolid mediocrity. It is very pitiful to see, but it will be still more pitiful yet. "Antichrist is visibly extending his arms:" yet it _must be so_, for after all we are on the right road--of disgust at all existence. "Forward then, boldly, with the world-process, as workers in the vineyard of the Lord, for it is the process alone that can lead to redemption!"
The vineyard of the Lord! The process! To redemption! Who does not see and hear in this how historical culture, that only knows the word "becoming," parodies itself on purpose and says the most irresponsible things about itself through its grotesque mask? For what does the rogue mean by this cry to the workers in the vineyard?
By what "work" are they to strive boldly forward? Or, to ask another question:--what further has the historically educated fanatic of the world-process to do,--swimming and drowning as he is in the sea of becoming,--that he may at last gather in that vintage of disgust, the precious grape of the vineyard? He has nothing to do but to live on as he has lived, love what he has loved, hate what he has hated, and read the newspapers he has always read. The only sin is for him to live otherwise than he has lived. We are told how he has lived, with monumental clearness, by that famous page with its large typed sentences, on which the whole rabble of our modern cultured folk have thrown themselves in blind ecstasy, because they believe they read their own justification there, haloed with an Apocalyptic light. For the unconscious parodist has demanded of every one of them, "the full surrender of his personality to the world-process, for the sake of his end, the redemption of the world": or still more clearly,--"the a.s.sertion of the will to live is proclaimed to be the first step on the right road: for it is only in the full surrender to life and its sorrow, and not in the cowardice of personal renunciation and retreat, that anything can be done for the world-process.... The striving for the denial of the individual will is as foolish as it is useless, more foolish even than suicide.... The thoughtful reader will understand without further explanation how a practical philosophy can be erected on these principles, and that such a philosophy cannot endure any disunion, but only the fullest reconciliation with life."
The thoughtful reader will understand! Then one really could misunderstand Hartmann! And what a splendid joke it is, that he should be misunderstood! Why should the Germans of to-day be particularly subtle? A valiant Englishman looks in vain for "delicacy of perception" and dares to say that "in the German mind there does seem to be something splay, something blunt-edged, unhandy and infelicitous." Could the great German parodist contradict this?
According to him, we are approaching "that ideal condition in which the human race makes its history with full consciousness": but we are obviously far from the perhaps more ideal condition, in which mankind can read Hartmann"s book with full consciousness. If we once reach it, the word "world-process" will never pa.s.s any man"s lips again without a smile. For he will remember the time when people listened to the mock gospel of Hartmann, sucked it in, attacked it, reverenced it, extended it and canonised it with all the honesty of that "German mind," with "the uncanny seriousness of an owl," as Goethe has it.
But the world must go forward, the ideal condition cannot be won by dreaming, it must be fought and wrestled for, and the way to redemption lies only through joyousness, the way to redemption from that dull, owlish seriousness. The time will come when we shall wisely keep away from all constructions of the world-process, or even of the history of man; a time when we shall no more look at ma.s.ses but at individuals, who form a sort of bridge over the wan stream of becoming. They may not perhaps continue a process, but they live out of time, as contemporaries: and thanks to history that permits such a company, they live as the Republic of geniuses of which Schopenhauer speaks. One giant calls to the other across the waste s.p.a.ces of time, and the high spirit-talk goes on, undisturbed by the wanton noisy dwarfs who creep among them. The task of history is to be the mediator between these, and even to give the motive and power to produce the great man. The aim of mankind can lie ultimately only in its highest examples.
Our low comedian has his word on this too, with his wonderful dialectic, which is just as genuine as its admirers are admirable.
"The idea of evolution cannot stand with our giving the world-process an endless duration in the past, for thus every conceivable evolution must have taken place, which is not the case (O rogue!); and so we cannot allow the process an endless duration in the future. Both would raise the conception of evolution to a mere ideal (And again rogue!), and would make the world-process like the sieve of the Danaides. The complete victory of the logical over the illogical (O thou complete rogue!) must coincide with the last day, the end in time of the world-process." No, thou clear, scornful spirit, so long as the illogical rules as it does to-day,--so long, for example, as the world-process can be spoken of as thou speakest of it, amid such deep-throated a.s.sent,--the last day is yet far off. For it is still too joyful on this earth, many an illusion still blooms here--like the illusion of thy contemporaries about thee. We are not yet ripe to be hurled into thy nothingness: for we believe that we shall have a still more splendid time, when men once begin to understand thee, thou misunderstood, unconscious one! But if, in spite of that, disgust shall come throned in power, as thou hast prophesied to thy readers; if thy portrayal of the present and the future shall prove to be right,--and no one has despised them with such loathing as thou,--I am ready then to cry with the majority in the form prescribed by thee, that next Sat.u.r.day evening, punctually at twelve o"clock, thy world shall fall to pieces. And our decree shall conclude thus--from to-morrow time shall not exist, and the _Times_ shall no more be published. Perhaps it will be in vain, and our decree of no avail: at any rate we have still time for a fine experiment. Take a balance and put Hartmann"s "Unconscious" in one of the scales, and his "World-process" in the other. There are some who believe they weigh equally; for in each scale there is an evil word--and a good joke.
When they are once understood, no one will take Hartmann"s words on the world-process as anything but a joke. It is, as a fact, high time to move forward with the whole battalion of satire and malice against the excesses of the "historical sense," the wanton love of the world-process at the expense of life and existence, the blind confusion of all perspective. And it will be to the credit of the philosopher of the Unconscious that he has been the first to see the humour of the world-process, and to succeed in making others see it still more strongly by the extraordinary seriousness of his presentation. The existence of the "world" and "humanity" need not trouble us for some time, except to provide us with a good joke: for the presumption of the small earthworm is the most uproariously comic thing on the face of the earth. Ask thyself to what end thou art here, as an individual; and if no one can tell thee, try then to justify the meaning of thy existence _a posteriori_, by putting before thyself a high and n.o.ble end. Perish on that rock! I know no better aim for life than to be broken on something great and impossible, _animae magnae prodigus_. But if we have the doctrines of the finality of "becoming," of the flux of all ideas, types, and species, of the lack of all radical difference between man and beast (a true but fatal idea as I think),--if we have these thrust on the people in the usual mad way for another generation, no one need be surprised if that people drown on its little miserable shoals of egoism, and petrify in its self-seeking. At first it will fall asunder and cease to be a people. In its place perhaps individualist systems, secret societies for the extermination of non-members, and similar utilitarian creations, will appear on the theatre of the future. Are we to continue to work for these creations and write history from the standpoint of the _ma.s.ses_; to look for laws in it, to be deduced from the needs of the ma.s.ses, the laws of motion of the lowest loam and clay strata of society? The ma.s.ses seem to be worth notice in three aspects only: first as the copies of great men, printed on bad paper from worn-out plates, next as a contrast to the great men, and lastly as their tools: for the rest, let the devil and statistics fly away with them! How could statistics prove that there are laws in history? Laws? Yes, they may prove how common and abominably uniform the ma.s.ses are: and should we call the effects of leaden folly, imitation, love and hunger--laws? We may admit it: but we are sure of this too--that so far as there are laws in history, the laws are of no value and the history of no value either. And least valuable of all is that kind of history which takes the great popular movements as the most important events of the past, and regards the great men only as their clearest expression, the visible bubbles on the stream. Thus the ma.s.ses have to produce the great man, chaos to bring forth order; and finally all the hymns are naturally sung to the teeming chaos. Everything is called "great" that has moved the ma.s.ses for some long time, and becomes, as they say, a "historical power." But is not this really an intentional confusion of quant.i.ty and quality? When the brutish mob have found some idea, a religious idea for example, which satisfies them, when they have defended it through thick and thin for centuries then, and then only, will they discover its inventor to have been a great man. The highest and n.o.blest does not affect the ma.s.ses at all. The historical consequences of Christianity, its "historical power," toughness and persistence prove nothing, fortunately, as to its founder"s greatness, They would have been a witness against him. For between him and the historical success of Christianity lies a dark heavy weight of pa.s.sion and error, l.u.s.t of power and honour, and the crushing force of the Roman Empire. From this, Christianity had its earthly taste, and its earthly foundations too, that made its continuance in this world possible. Greatness should not depend on success; Demosthenes is great without it. The purest and n.o.blest adherents of Christianity have always doubted and hindered, rather than helped, its effect in the world, its so-called "historical power"; for they were accustomed to stand outside the "world," and cared little for the "process of the Christian Idea." Hence they have generally remained unknown to history, and their very names are lost.
In Christian terms the devil is the prince of the world, and the lord of progress and consequence: he is the power behind all "historical power," and so will it remain, however ill it may sound to-day in ears that are accustomed to canonise such power and consequence. The world has become skilled at giving new names to things and even baptizing the devil. It is truly an hour of great danger. Men seem to be near the discovery that the egoism of individuals, groups or ma.s.ses has been at all times the lever of the "historical movements": and yet they are in no way disturbed by the discovery, but proclaim that "egoism shall be our G.o.d." With this new faith in their hearts, they begin quite intentionally to build future history on egoism: though it must be a clever egoism, one that allows of some limitation, that it may stand firmer; one that studies history for the purpose of recognising the foolish kind of egoism. Their study has taught them that the state has a special mission in all future egoistic systems: it will be the patron of all the clever egoisms, to protect them with all the power of its military and police against the dangerous outbreaks of the other kind. There is the same idea in introducing history--natural as well as human history--among the labouring cla.s.ses, whose folly makes them dangerous. For men know well that a grain of historical culture is able to break down the rough, blind instincts and desires, or to turn them to the service of a clever egoism. In fact they are beginning to think, with Edward von Hartmann, of "fixing themselves with an eye to the future in their earthly home, and making themselves comfortable there." Hartmann calls this life the "manhood of humanity" with an ironical reference to what is now called "manhood";--as if only our sober models of selfishness were embraced by it; just as he prophesies an age of graybeards following on this stage,--obviously another ironical glance at our ancient time-servers. For he speaks of the ripe discretion with which "they view all the stormy pa.s.sions of their past life and understand the vanity of the ends they seem to have striven for." No, a manhood of crafty and historically cultured egoism corresponds to an old age that hangs to life with no dignity but a horrible tenacity, where the
"last scene of all That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."
Whether the dangers of our life and culture come from these dreary, toothless old men, or from the so-called "men" of Hartmann, we have the right to defend our youth with tooth and claw against both of them, and never tire of saving the future from these false prophets.
But in this battle we shall discover an unpleasant truth--that men intentionally help, and encourage, and use, the worst aberrations of the historical sense from which the present time suffers.
They use it, however, against youth, in order to transform it into that ripe "egoism of manhood" they so long for: they use it to overcome the natural reluctance of the young by its magical splendour, which unmans while it enlightens them. Yes, we know only too well the kind of ascendency history can gain; how it can uproot the strongest instincts of youth, pa.s.sion, courage, unselfishness and love; can cool its feeling for justice, can crush or repress its desire for a slow ripening by the contrary desire to be soon productive, ready and useful; and cast a sick doubt over all honesty and downrightness of feeling. It can even cozen youth of its fairest privilege, the power of planting a great thought with the fullest confidence, and letting it grow of itself to a still greater thought.
An excess of history can do all that, as we have seen, by no longer allowing a man to feel and act _unhistorically_: for history is continually shifting his horizon and removing the atmosphere surrounding him. From an infinite horizon he withdraws into himself, back into the small egoistic circle, where he must become dry and withered: he may possibly attain to cleverness, but never to wisdom.
He lets himself be talked over, is always calculating and parleying with facts. He is never enthusiastic, but blinks his eyes, and understands how to look for his own profit or his party"s in the profit or loss of somebody else. He unlearns all his useless modesty, and turns little by little into the "man" or the "graybeard" of Hartmann. And that is what they _want_ him to be: that is the meaning of the present cynical demand for the "full surrender of the personality to the world-process"--for the sake of his end, the redemption of the world, as the rogue E. von Hartmann tells us.
Though redemption can scarcely be the conscious aim of these people: the world were better redeemed by being redeemed from these "men" and "graybeards." For then would come the reign of youth.
X.
And in this kingdom of youth I can cry Land! Land! Enough, and more than enough, of the wild voyage over dark strange seas, of eternal search and eternal disappointment! The coast is at last in sight.
Whatever it be, we must land there, and the worst haven is better than tossing again in the hopeless waves of an infinite scepticism.
Let us hold fast by the land: we shall find the good harbours later and make the voyage easier for those who come after us.
The voyage was dangerous and exciting. How far are we even now from that quiet state of contemplation with which we first saw our ship launched! In tracking out the dangers of history, we have found ourselves especially exposed to them. We carry on us the marks of that sorrow which an excess of history brings in its train to the men of the modern time. And this present treatise, as I will not attempt to deny, shows the modern note of a weak personality in the intemperateness of its criticism, the unripeness of its humanity, in the too frequent transitions from irony to cynicism, from arrogance to scepticism. And yet I trust in the inspiring power that directs my vessel instead of genius; I trust in _youth_, that has brought me on the right road in forcing from me a protest against the modern historical education, and a demand that the man must learn to live, above all, and only use history in the service of the life that he has learned to live. He must be young to understand this protest; and considering the premature grayness of our present youth, he can scarcely be young enough if he would understand its reason as well.
An example will help me. In Germany, not more than a century ago, a natural instinct for what is called "poetry" was awakened in some young men. Are we to think that the generations who had lived before that time had not spoken of the art, however really strange and unnatural it may have been to them? We know the contrary; that they had thought, written, and quarrelled about it with all their might--in "words, words, words." Giving life to such words did not prove the death of the word-makers; in a certain sense they are living still. For if, as Gibbon says, nothing but time--though a long time--is needed for a world to perish, so nothing but time--though still more time--is needed for a false idea to be destroyed in Germany, the "Land of Little-by-little." In any event, there are perhaps a hundred men more now than there were a century ago who know what poetry is: perhaps in another century there will be a hundred more who have learned in the meantime what culture is, and that the Germans have had as yet no culture, however proudly they may talk about it. The general satisfaction of the Germans at their culture will seem as foolish and incredible to such men as the once lauded cla.s.sicism of Gottsched, or the reputation of Ramler as the German Pindar, seemed to us. They will perhaps think this "culture" to be merely a kind of knowledge about culture, and a false and superficial knowledge at that. False and superficial, because the Germans endured the contradiction between life and knowledge, and did not see what was characteristic in the culture of really educated peoples, that it can only rise and bloom from life. But by the Germans it is worn like a paper flower, or spread over like the icing on a cake; and so must remain a useless lie for ever.
The education of youth in Germany starts from this false and unfruitful idea of culture. Its aim, when faced squarely, is not to form the liberally educated man, but the professor, the man of science, who wants to be able to make use of his science as soon as possible, and stands on one side in order to see life clearly. The result, even from a ruthlessly practical point of view, is the historically and aesthetically trained Philistine, the babbler of old saws and new wisdom on Church, State and Art, the sensorium that receives a thousand impressions, the insatiable belly that yet knows not what true hunger and thirst is. An education with such an aim and result is against nature. But only he who is not quite drowned in it can feel that; only youth can feel it, because it still has the instinct of nature, that is the first to be broken by that education.
But he who will break through that education in his turn, must come to the help of youth when called upon; must let the clear light of understanding shine on its unconscious striving, and bring it to a full, vocal consciousness. How is he to attain such a strange end?
Princ.i.p.ally by destroying the superst.i.tion that this kind of education is _necessary_. People think nothing but this troublesome reality of ours is possible. Look through the literature of higher education in school and college for the last ten years, and you will be astonished--and pained--to find how much alike all the proposals of reform have been; in spite of all the hesitations and violent controversies surrounding them. You will see how blindly they have all adopted the old idea of the "educated man" (in our sense) being the necessary and reasonable basis of the system. The monotonous canon runs thus: the young man must begin with a knowledge of culture, not even with a knowledge of life, still less with life and the living of it. This knowledge of culture is forced into the young mind in the form of historical knowledge; which means that his head is filled with an enormous ma.s.s of ideas, taken second-hand from past times and peoples, not from immediate contact with life. He desires to experience something for himself, and feel a close-knit, living system of experiences growing within himself. But his desire is drowned and dizzied in the sea of shams, as if it were possible to sum up in a few years the highest and notablest experiences of ancient times, and the greatest times too. It is the same mad method that carries our young artists off to picture-galleries, instead of the studio of a master, and above all the one studio of the only master, Nature. As if one could discover by a hasty rush through history the ideas and technique of past times, and their individual outlook on life! For life itself is a kind of handicraft that must be learned thoroughly and industriously, and diligently practised, if we are not to have mere botchers and babblers as the issue of it all!
Plato thought it necessary for the first generation of his new society (in the perfect state) to be brought up with the help of a "mighty lie." The children were to be taught to believe that they had all lain dreaming for a long time under the earth, where they had been moulded and formed by the master-hand of Nature. It was impossible to go against the past, and work against the work of G.o.ds!
And so it had to be an unbreakable law of nature, that he who is born to be a philosopher has gold in his body, the fighter has only silver, and the workman iron and bronze. As it is not possible to blend these metals, according to Plato, so there could never be any confusion between the cla.s.ses: the belief in the _aeterna veritas_ of this arrangement was the basis of the new education and the new state. So the modern German believes also in the _aeterna veritas_ of his education, of his kind of culture: and yet this belief will fail--as the Platonic state would have failed--if the mighty German lie be ever opposed by the truth, that the German has no culture because he cannot build one on the basis of his education. He wishes for the flower without the root or the stalk; and so he wishes in vain. That is the simple truth, a rude and unpleasant truth, but yet a mighty one.
But our first generation must be brought up in this "mighty truth,"
and must suffer from it too; for it must educate itself through it, even against its own nature, to attain a new nature and manner of life, which shall yet proceed from the old. So it might say to itself, in the old Spanish phrase, "Defienda me Dios de my," G.o.d keep me from myself, from the character, that is, which has been put into me. It must taste that truth drop by drop, like a bitter, powerful medicine. And every man in this generation must subdue himself to pa.s.s the judgment on his own nature, which he might pa.s.s more easily on his whole time:--"We are without instruction, nay, we are too corrupt to live, to see and hear truly and simply, to understand what is near and natural to us. We have not yet laid even the foundations of culture, for we are not ourselves convinced that we have a sincere life in us." We crumble and fall asunder, our whole being is divided, half mechanically, into an inner and outer side; we are sown with ideas as with dragon"s teeth, and bring forth a new dragon-brood of them; we suffer from the malady of words, and have no trust in any feeling that is not stamped with its special word. And being such a dead fabric of words and ideas, that yet has an uncanny movement in it, I have still perhaps the right to say _cogito ergo sum_, though not _vivo ergo cogito_. I am permitted the empty _esse_, not the full green _vivere_. A primary feeling tells me that I am a thinking being but not a living one, that I am no "animal," but at most a "cogital."
"Give me life, and I will soon make you a culture out of it"--will be the cry of every man in this new generation, and they will all know each other by this cry. But who will give them this life?
No G.o.d and no man will give it--only their own _youth_. Set this free, and you will set life free as well. For it only lay concealed, in a prison; it is not yet withered or dead--ask your own selves!