Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/108

 62. In this way, I say, spiritual culture—and here especially thinking in a primitive language is meant—does not exert an influence on life; it is itself the life of him who thinks in this fashion. Nevertheless it necessarily strives, from the life that thinks in this way, to influence other life outside it, and so to influence the life of all about it and to form this life in accordance with itself. For, just because that kind of thinking is life, it is felt by its possessor with inward pleasure in its vitalizing, transfiguring, and liberating power. But everyone to whose inmost being happiness has been revealed is bound to wish that everyone else may experience the same bliss; he is thus driven, and must work, to the end that the stream from which he has drawn his own well-being may spread itself over others too. It is different with him who has merely apprehended the possibility of second-hand thinking. Just as its substance yields him neither weal nor woe, but merely occupies his leisure agreeably and entertainingly, so it is impossible for him to believe that it can bring weal or woe to anyone else. In the end it is to him a matter of indifference on what subject anyone exercises his ingenuity or with what he occupies his hours of leisure.

63. Of the means of introducing into the lives of all the thought that has begun in the life of the individual, the highest and best is poetry; hence this is the second main branch of the spiritual culture of a people. The thinker designates his thought in language, and this, as we have said above, cannot be done except by images of sense and, moreover, by an act of creation extending beyond the previous range of sensuous imagery. In doing this the thinker is himself a poet; if he is not a poet, language will fail him when his first thought comes, and, when he attempts the second, thought itself will