Then came Morpheus and played before him with happy children, with crowned mothers, with shapes that kissed each other, and with fleeting mortals, and when the angel awoke with ecstasy, Morpheus and the human race and the world's history had disappeared....
—At present the angel still sleeps and dreams,—we are still in his dream,—only Phobetor is with him, and Morpheus still waits for Phobetor with his beasts to disappear....
But let us, instead of dreaming, think and hope; and for the present ask: will vegetable men, animal men, at last be succeeded by divine men? Does the going of the world-clock betray as much design as the building of it, and has it a dial-plate wheel and an index hand?
One cannot (with a well-known philosopher) reason directly from final causes in Physics to final causes in History, any more than I, in the individual, can deduce from the teleological (intentional) structure of a man a teleological biography of the same, or any more than, from the ingenious structure of animals, I call infer a continuous plan in their universal history. Nature is iron, always the same, and the wisdom shown in her framework is never obscured; the human race is free, and, like the infusorial animal, the multiform Vorticelle, assumes every moment, now regular, now anomalous shapes. Every physical disorder is only the hull of an order, every foul spring is the hull of a fair autumn; but are, then, our vices the buds of our virtues, and is the earthly fall of a continually sinking villain nothing but a disguised ascension of his to heaven?—And is there an object in the life of a Nero? Then I could just as well take back and reverse all and make out virtues to be the heart-leaves of disguised vices. But if, as many a one does, we carry the abuse of language so far as to reverse moral height and depth, like geometrical, according to the point of view, as positive and negative magnitudes; if, therefore, all gouty knobs, spotted fevers, and lead-[[289]] or silver-colics of the human race are nothing but a different kind of healthiness: then we certainly need not ask whether man will ever get well; in that case he could never in any possible maladies be anything but well.
If a monk of the tenth century had shut himself up in a fit of melancholy, and meditated on the earth, not however on its end, but on its future: would not, in his dreams, the thirteenth century have been already a brighter one, and the eighteenth merely a glorified tenth?
Our weather-prophesyings from present temperature are logically correct and historically false, because new casualties, an earthquake, a comet, reverse the currents of the whole atmosphere. Can the above-imagined monk correctly calculate, if he does not assume such future magnitudes as America, Gunpowder, and Printer's ink?—A new religion, a new Alexander, a new disease, a new Franklin, can break, swallow up, dam, turn back the forest stream whose course and contents we propose to reduce on our parchment. There lie still four quarters of the globe full of enchained savage races;—their chain daily grows thinner,—time unlooses it;—what desolation, at least what changes, must they not bring about on the little bowling-green of our cultivated countries? Nevertheless, all nations of the earth must one day be fused together and be purified in a common fermentation, if ever this atmosphere of life is to be cleared up.
Can we draw from some miniature earthquakes and volcanoes, which we ourselves have produced with iron-filings and aquafortis, (in this case, types and printer's ink,) conclusions as to the Ætna eruptions, i. e. from the revolutions of the few cultivated peoples as to those of the uncultivated? Since we may assume that the human race lives as many thousands of years as the individual does years, may we venture from the sixth year to set the horoscope of youth and manhood? Add to this that the biography of this childish period is precisely the most meagre, and that awakened nations—almost all quarters of the globe are as yet full of sleeping ones—in one year produce more historical material, and consequently more historians, than a sleep-buried Africa in a century. We shall, therefore, then be best able to prophesy from universal history, when the awaking nations shall have appended to it their million or two supplementary volumes.—All savage nations seem to have been under one stamp; on the contrary, the mint of culture coins each one differently. The North American and the old German resemble each other more strongly than Germans do Germans of neighboring centuries. Neither the Golden Bull, nor the Magna Charta, nor the Code Noir, could Aristotle inlay into his forms of government and obedience; else he would have extended them; but are we then confident of foreseeing any better the future national convention in Mongolia, or the Decretal Letters and Extravagants of the enlightened Dalai-Lama, or the Recesses of the Arab Imperial Bench of Knights? Since Nature coins no people with one mint-stamp or one hand alone, but with thousands at once,—hence on the German race is there a greater multitude of impressions than on the shield of Achilles,—how do we, who cannot even calculate the past, but simpler, revolutions of the globe, expect to look into the moral ones of its inhabitants?
Of all that follows from these premises I believe the opposite, excepting the necessity of prophetic modesty. Scepticism, which makes us, instead of slow to believe, unbelieving, and instead of the eyes proposes to purge the light, becomes nonsense and the most fearful philosophical impotence and atony.
Man regards his century or his half-century as the culmination of light, as a festal-day, to which all other centuries lead only as week-days. He knows only two golden ages,—the one at the beginning of the world, and the one at the end of it,—by which he understands only his own; he finds history to be like great woods, in the middle of which are silence, night-birds, and birds of prey, and whose borders only are filled with light and song.—Certainly all things serve me; but I too serve all. As Nature, who in her eternity knows no loss of time, in her inexhaustibleness no loss of power, has no other law of frugality assigned her than that of prodigality,—as she, with eggs and seed-corns, ministers equally well to nourishment and to propagation,[[290]] and with an undeveloped germ-world sustains half a developed one,—as her way leads over no smooth bowling-alley, but over alps and seas;—our little heart must needs misunderstand her, whether in its hopes or in its fears; it must, as it becomes enlightened, reciprocally interchange morning and evening red; it must, in its contentment, now regard after-summer as spring, and now after-winter as autumn. Moral revolutions mislead us more than physical, because the former according to their nature occupy a greater play-room and space of time than the latter,—and yet the Dark Ages are nothing but a dipping into the shadow of Saturn, or an eclipse of the sun of short duration. A man who should be six thousand years old, would say to the six creation-days of the world's history, They are very good.
But one should never set moral and physical revolutions and developments too near to each other. All Nature has no other motions than former ones; the circle is her path, she has no other years than Platonic,—but man alone is changeable, and the straight line or the zigzag describes his course. A sun has its eclipses as well as the moon, has its bloom and decay like a flower, but also its palingenesia and renovation. But there lies in the human race the necessity of an everlasting mutation; yet here there are only ascending and descending signs, no culmination; they do not necessarily draw one another after them, as in physics, and have no extreme limit. No people, no period returns; in physics, all must come back again. It is only accidental, not necessary, that nations, at a certain age and stage of progress, and on a certain rotten round of the ladder, fall again,—one only confounds the last step, from which nations fall, with the highest; the Romans, with whom not single rounds, but the whole ladder broke, were not necessitated to sink by a culture which does not equal even our own.[[291]] Nations have no age, or old age with them often precedes youth. Even with individuals the crab's-walk of the mind in old age is only accidental; still less has virtue in them a summer-solstice. Humanity has then the capacity of an endless improvement; but has it the hope also?—