externally, prosperous internally, was wrought, unlike that of any other people, from within outward. In Lange's words, "our national development started from the most ideal and approximated more and more to the real." Hegel and Heine agree that in Germany the French Revolution and the Napoleonic career were paralleled by a philosophic revolution and an intellectual empire. You recall the bitter word that, when Napoleon was finally conquered and Europe partitioned, to Germany was assigned the kingdom of the clouds. But this aërial and tenuous kingdom became a mighty power, working with and in the statesmen of Prussia and the scholars of Germany to found a kingdom on the solid earth. Spiritual and ideal Germany made common cause with realistic and practical Prussia. As says Von Sybel, the historian of the "Founding of the German Empire":
"Germany had been ruined through its own disintegration and had dragged Prussia with it into the abyss. It was well known that the wild fancies of the Conqueror hovered about the utter annihilation of Prussia; if this should take place, then east as well as west of the Elbe, not only political independence, but every trace of a German spirit, the German language and customs, German art and learning—everything would be wiped out by the foreigners. But this fatal danger was perceived just at the time when everybody had been looking up to Kant and Schiller, had been admiring Faust, the world-embracing masterpiece of Goethe's, and had recognized that Alexander von Humboldt's cosmological studies and Niebuhr's "Roman History" had created a new era in European science and learning. In such intellectual attainments the Germans felt that they were far superior to the vanquisher of the world and his great nation; and so the political interests of Prussia and the salvation of the German nationality exactly coincided. Schleiermacher's patriotic sermons, Fichte's stirring addresses to the German people, Humboldt's glorious founding of the Berlin University, served to augment the resisting power of Prussia, while Scharnhorst's recruits and militia were devoted to the defense of German honor and German customs. Everyone felt that German nationality was lost if Prussia did not come to its rescue, and that, too, there was no safety possible for Prussia unless all Germany was free.
"What a remarkable providence it was that brought together, as in the Middle Ages, on this ancient colonial ground, a throng of the most energetic men from all districts of Germany. For neither Stein nor his follower, Hardenberg, nor the generals Scharnhorst, Bluecher and Gneisenau, nor the authors, Niebuhr, Fichte and K. F. Eichorn, nor many others who might be mentioned, were born in Prussia; yet because their thoughts centered in Germany, they had become loyal Prussians. The name Germany had been blotted from the political map of Europe, but never had so many hearts thrilled at the thought of being German.
"Thus on the most eastern frontier of German life, in the midst of troubles which seemed hopeless, the idea of German unity, which had lain dormant for centuries, now sprang up in a new birth. At first this idea was held exclusively by the great men of the times and remained the invaluable possession of the cultivated classes; but once started it spread far and wide among the younger generation. . . . But it was easier to defeat the mighty Napoleon than to bend the German sentiments of dualism and individualism to the spirit of national unity."
What I have called the ethical pantheism and monistic idealism of Fichte (a type of philosophy reigning almost unchallenged in Germany till almost the middle of the century) was an effective
weapon in fighting and winning this more difficult battle. In his volume on the "Romantic School in Germany," Brandes quotes from the diary of Hoffman a passage written in 1809.
"Seized by a strange fancy at the ball on the 6th, I imagine myself looking at my own Ego through a kaleidoscope. All the forms moving around me are Egos and annoy me by what they do and leave undone."
It is a temptation to find in this passage a symbol both of German philosophy and of the temper of Germany at the time. Its outer defeats, its weakness in the world of action, had developed an exasperated introspection. This outer weakness, coinciding, as Von Sybel points out, with the bloom of Germany in art, philosophy, history, philology and philosophy, made the Ego of Germany the noblest contemporary object of contemplation, yet one surrounded with other national Egos who offended by what they did and what they did not do. Patriotism, national feeling, national consciousness are common enough facts. But nowhere save in Germany, in the earlier nineteenth century, have these sentiments and
impulses been transformed by deliberate nurture into a mystic cult. This was the time when the idea of the Volks-seele, the Volks-geist, was born; and the idea lost no time in becoming a fact. Not merely poetry was affected by it, but philology, history and jurisprudence. The so-called historic school is its offspring. The science of social psychology derives from it at one remove. The soul, however, needed a body, and (quite in accord with German idealism) it formed a body for itself—the German State as a unified Empire.
While the idealistic period came first, it is important to bear in mind the kind of idealism it was. At this point the pantheistic allusion becomes significant. The idealism in question was not an idealism of another world but of this world, and especially of the State. The embodiment of the divine and absolute will and ideal is the existing world of nature and of men. Especially is the human ego the authorized and creative agent of absolute purpose. The significance of German philosophy was precisely to make men aware of their nature and destiny as the direct and active representatives of absolute and creative purpose.
If I again quote Heine, it is because, with his contempt for technical philosophy, he had an intimate sense of its human meaning. Of German pantheistic idealism, he wrote in 1833 while it was still in its prime:
"God is identical with the world. . . . But he manifests himself most gloriously in man, who feels and thinks at the same time, who is capable of distinguishing his own individuality from objective nature, whose intellect already bears within itself the ideas that present themselves to him in the phenomenal world. In man Deity reaches self-consciousness, and this self-consciousness God again reveals through man. But this revelation does not take place in and through individual man, but in and through collective humanity . . . which comprehends and represents in idea and in reality the whole God-universe. . . . It is an error to suppose that this religion leads men to indifference. On the contrary, the consciousness of his divinity will inspire man with enthusiasm for its manifestation, and from this moment the really noble achievements of true heroism glorify the earth."