In our own enlightened times of general school education, nobody needs any more the sign as a guide through even the most modest town. Everywhere the number has taken its place for this purpose and we regret to admit for the history of the sign too the truth of Darwin’s words: “Progress in history means the decline of phantasy and the advance of thought.”
Sonne Neckarsulm,
Württemberg
[ENVOY AND THE MORAL?]
“I am here in a strange land and have perhaps the seat of honor at table in this inn; but the man down there on the end has just as good a right here and there as I, since we are both here only guests.”
Martin Luther: Sermons. Jubilate, 1542.
It is not very much the fashion in these modern days to ask for the moral meaning of things, but we are old-fashioned enough to hold with those who believe that things have not only a soul, but that they give us a lesson too in revealing their soul to us, “la leçon des choses,” as the French, whom we are inclined to call condescendingly the immoral French, call it. Old Frederic the Great in his famous interview with the poet Gellert in Leipzig, after hearing from him one of his fables “The Painter of Athens,” did not fail to ask the all-important question: “And the Moral?”