Another Association closely resembling the Illuminés, Berckheim reports, is known as the Idealists, whose system is founded on the doctrine of perfectibility; these kindred sects "agree in seeing in the words of Holy Scripture the pledge of universal regeneration, of an absolute levelling down, and it is in this spirit that the sectarians interpret the sacred books."
Berckheim further confirms the assertion I made in World Revolution--contested, as usual, by a reviewer without a shred of evidence to the contrary--that the Tugendbund derived from the Illuminati. "The League of Virtue," he writes, "was directed by the secondary chiefs of the Illuminés.... In 1810 the Friends of Virtue were so identified with the Illuminés in the North of Germany that no line of demarcation was seen between them."
But it is time to turn to the testimony of another witness on the activities of the secret societies which is likewise to be found at the Archives Nationales.[650] This consists of a document transmitted by the Court of Vienna to the Government of France after the Restoration, and contains the interrogatory of a certain Witt Doehring, a nephew of the Baron d'Eckstein, who, after taking part in secret society intrigues, was summoned before the judge Abel at Bayreuth in February, 1824. Amongst secret associations recently existing in Germany, the witness asserted, were the "Independents" and the "Absolutes"; the latter "adored in Robespierre their most perfect ideal, so that the crimes committed during the French Revolution by this monster and the Montagnards of the Convention were in their eyes, in accordance with their moral system, heroic actions ennobled and sanctified by their aim." The same document goes on to explain why so many combustible elements had failed to produce an explosion in Germany:
The thing that seemed the great obstacle to the plans of the Independents... was what they called the servile character and the dog-like fidelity [Hundestreue] of the German people, that is to say, that attachment--innate and firmly impressed on their minds without even the aid of reason--which that excellent people everywhere bears towards its princes.
A traveller in Germany during the year 1795 admirably summed up the matter in these words:
The Germans are in this respect [of democracy] the most curious people in the world ... the cold and sober temperament of the Germans and their tranquil imagination enable them to combine the most daring opinions with the most servile conduct. That will explain to you ... why so much combustible material accumulating for so many years beneath the political edifice of Germany has not yet damaged it. Most of the princes, accustomed to see their men of letters so constantly free in their writings and so constantly slavish in their hearts, have not thought it necessary to use severity against this sheeplike herd of modern Gracchi and Brutuses. Some of them [the princes] have even without difficulty adopted part of their opinions, and Illuminism having doubtless been presented to them as perfection, the complement of philosophy, they were easily persuaded to be initiated into it. But great care was taken not to let them know more than the interests of the sect demanded.[651]
It was thus that Illuminism, unable to provoke a blaze in the home of its birth, spread, as before the French Revolution, to a more inflammable Latin race--this time the Italians. Six years after his interrogatory at Beyreuth, Witt Doehring published his book on the secret societies of France and Italy, in which he now realized he had played the part of dupe, and incidentally confirms the statement I have previously quoted, that the Alta Vendita was a further development of the Illuminati.
This infamous association, with which I have dealt at length elsewhere,[652] constituted the Supreme Directory of the Carbonari and was led by a group of Italian noblemen, amongst whom a prince, "the profoundest of initiates, was charged as Inspector-General of the Order" to propagate its principles throughout the North of Europe. "He had received from the hands of Kingge [i.e. Knigge, the ally of Weishaupt?] the cahiers of the last three degrees." But these were of course unknown to the great majority of Carbonari, who entered the association in all good faith. Witt Doehring then shows how faithfully the system of Weishaupt was carried out by the Alta Vendita. In the three first degrees, he explains--
It is still a question of the morality of Christianity and even of the Church, for which those who wish to be received must promise to sacrifice themselves. The initiates imagine, according to this formula, that the object of the association is something high and noble, that it is the Order of those who desire a purer morality and a stronger piety, the independence and the unity of their country. One cannot therefore judge the Carbonari en masse; there are excellent men amongst them.... But everything changes after one has taken the three degrees. Already in the fourth, in that of the Apostoli, one promises to overthrow all monarchies, and especially the kings of the race of the Bourbons. But it is only in the seventh and last degree, reached by few, that revelations go further. At last the veil is torn completely for the Principi Summo Patriarcho. Then one learns that the aim of the Carbonari is just the same as that of the Illuminés. This degree, in which a man is at the same time prince and bishop, coincides with the Homo Rex of the latter. The initiate vows the ruin of all religion and of all positive government, whether despotic or democratic; murder, poison, perjury, are all at their disposal. Who does not remember that on the suppression of the Illuminés was found, amongst other poisons, a tinctura ad abortum faciendum. The summo maestro laughs at the zeal of the mass of Carbonari who have sacrificed themselves for the liberty and independence of Italy, neither one nor the other being for him a goal but a method.[653]
Witt Doehring, who had himself reached the degree of P.S.P., thereupon declares that, having taken his vows under a misapprehension, he holds himself to be released from his obligations and conceives it his duty to warn society. "The fears that assail governments are only too well founded. The soil of Europe is volcanic."[654]