Columbus has sailed over the blue seas, and a new side of the earth lies in the violet haze of the dawn. Copernicus sees the ball of the earth roll round the sun through space, by force of some mysterious law. Kepler dreams of the world-harmony that will replace the ever-acting Deity, and discovers at length an unsuspected regularity in the framework of the heavens. Galileo turns his new optic tube to the stars, and at once the heavens are changed, not only for the calculating, mathematical mind, but even for the eye of sense: there are jagged peaks on the moon, satellites circling about Jupiter, a wilderness of stars lying across the Milky Way, spots on the sun, rings round Saturn. Giordano Bruno shatters the ancient crystalline vault of the firmament; every “fixed star” in the Milky Way is to him a flaming sun, the pulsing heart of a whole world, in which, perchance, human hearts like ours throb and leap on a hundred planets. The red, murderous flames of hate close over Bruno, but they cannot dim the light of the new stars. It is in the eye and the brain of the new men that arise, and will nevermore fade from them.
The seventeenth century, opening amid the last glare of the martyr-fires, quickens with a vague yearning and expectation.
In the eighteenth century the old world breaks up. From the new stars, from the new world, new ideas come. On all sides is the crash and roar of conflict. Dread flames break out in the social, moral, and æsthetic life of men. But the century ends in the birth of a greater artist than Michael Angelo.
Goethe, on the morn of the nineteenth century, paints a new Sixtine Chapel in his poetry. But he no longer depicts the old ideas. He speaks of God-Nature. To him God is the eternal force of the All. His thoughts turn no longer on Creation and the Last Judgment. An eternal evolution is the source of his inspiration. He regards the whole universe as a single, immeasurable revelation of spirit. But this spirit is the rhythmic outflow of infinite developments. It becomes Milky Way and sun and planet, blue lotus-flowers and gay butterfly. At last it takes the form of man, and reads the stars as an open book. In Homer and Goethe it directs the style and the pen; in Michael Angelo and Raphael it guides the pencil and the brush.
All this unfolds in Goethe, as in a vision with yet half-opened eyes.
Then the nineteenth century begins. Nature is its salvation, the salvation of its most practical, most real need. It must struggle for its existence, like any other century, but it has new and improved weapons for the struggle. All the earlier ages were but poor blunderers. The lightning flashed on the naked savage, and he fell on his knees and prayed, powerless as he was. In the eighteenth century it dawned on men’s minds that this might be some force of nature. The nineteenth century sets its foot on the neck of the demon of this force, presses him into its service, plays with him. Its thoughts and words flash along the lightning current, as if along new nerve-tracks, that begin to circle the globe. Man becomes lord of the earth, from the uppermost azure down into the dark, cold abysses of the ocean, from the icy pole to the burning tropical desert. And at length man turns his thoughts upon himself.
Man, his arm resting on the splendid instruments of modern research, raises his hand to his brow, and turns philosopher. He becomes at once more bold and more modest than ever.
What Goethe had seen in vision rises before him now in sharp, almost hard outline from his own real life-work. He has succeeded in bringing nature and its forces to his feet, because it was flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood. He is its child. A thousand tongues proclaim the truth to him, a naïve, almost simple, revelation of reality. He digs in the earth, and ancient bones and skulls tell him vaguely of the past. Such once was he, devoid of civilisation, at the verge of the animal world. He searches his frame through and through for further light. There is the brain, where the thoughts crowd together. There is the cell, that builds up the whole body, the cell that so closely resembles the lowest of all living things, not yet distinct enough to be either animal or plant. Here are the forms that he successively assumes in his mother’s body, before he is born—forms that can hardly be distinguished from those of the animal at the same stage of development. From almost divine heights he has sunk down to the beast, to the primitive cell—nay, deeper still, to the elementary, force-impelled matter of the universe.
But this early picture dissolves at once in an ennobling and inspiring truth. Nature becomes man. In this he presses once more to the heart of the most-high. Nature is God. Goethe sang of God-Nature. The new God pulses in every wave of man’s blood. In Michael Angelo’s picture God breathes his spirit into Adam. The new Adam of the nineteenth century is God’s spirit, in body and soul, from the very first, for he is Nature. He needs no more. When he looks up to the shining stars, he looks into the eyes of God and his own. He has come down from those stars like the bright dew in which they are now mirrored. He belongs to them, but they also are in him. All-Nature: and he is a part of Nature. All-development: and he is a phase of the development.
That is the great philosophical dream of the nineteenth-century worker. His hand is black with labour, but his spirit is full of light, the light of the stars and of the world.