[152]. Vermeintlich. The allusion is presumably to the fact that Copernicus, adhering to the hypothesis of circular orbits, was obliged to retain some elements of Ptolemy’s geocentric machinery of epicycles, so that Copernicus’s sun was not placed at the true centre of any planetary orbit.—Tr.
[153]. Sprüche in Reimen.
[154]. See Vol. II, pp. 294 et seq., 359 et seq.
[155]. The path from Calvin to Darwin is easily seen in English philosophy.
[156]. This is one of the eternal points of dispute in Western art-theory. The Classical, ahistorical, Euclidean soul has no “evolution”; the Western, on the contrary, extends itself in evolving like the convergent function that it is. The one is, the other becomes. And thus all Classical tragedy assumes the constancy of the personality, and all Western its variability, which essentially constitutes a “character” in our sense, viz., a picture of being that consists in continuous qualitative movement and an endless wealth of relationships. In Sophocles the grand gesture ennobles the suffering, in Shakespeare the grand idea (Gesinnung) ennobles the doing. As our æsthetic took its examples from both Cultures, it was bound to go wrong in the very enunciation of its problem.
[157]. “The older one becomes, the more one is persuaded that His Sacred Majesty Chance does three-quarters of the work of this miserable Universe.” (Frederick the Great to Voltaire.) So, necessarily, must the genuine rationalist conceive it.
[158]. See Vol. II, pp. 20 et seq.
[159]. The incident which is said to have precipitated the French war on Algiers (1827).—Tr.
[160]. Act. II, Scene VII.—Tr.
[161]. In the general upheaval of 1848 a German national parliament was assembled at Frankfurt, of a strongly democratic colour, and it chose Frederick William IV of Prussia as hereditary emperor. Frederick William, however, refused to “pick up a crown out of the gutter.” For the history of this momentous episode, the English reader may be referred to the Cambridge Modern History or to the article Germany (History) in the Ency. Brit., XI Edition.—Tr.