Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/118

 unperceived. But as soon as they have really grasped them and not, as it were, merely passed them on from hand to hand, they will grasp them as their nature impels them to do, not merely as knowledge of a foreign life, but as an element of their own life. So they will not only derive them from the life of the new world, but also bring them into it again, incarnating the hitherto merely airy figures in solid bodies that will endure in real life.

These figures, thus transformed in a way that would never have been possible to foreign countries, the latter now receive from them again. Through this channel alone is a development of the human race possible on the path of antiquity, a union of the two main portions, and a regular progress of human evolution. In this new order of things the mother-country will not actually invent anything; but, in the smallest as in the greatest matters, it will always have to acknowledge that it has been stimulated by some hint from abroad. The foreign countries themselves were in their turn stimulated by the ancients, but the mother-country will take earnestly, and bring into life, what other countries have only superficially and hastily sketched out. As we have already said, this is not the place to illustrate this relationship by striking and far-reaching examples. This we reserve for our next address.

69. In this way both parts of the joint nation remained one, and only in this simultaneous separation and unity do they form a graft on the stem of the culture of antiquity, which otherwise would have been broken off by the new age, and so humanity would have begun again from the beginning. The two parts have these vocations laid upon them, different at the starting-point but coming together at the goal; each part must recognize its own