Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/119

 vocation and that of the other, and in accordance therewith each part must make use of the other. It is especially necessary for each part to consent to assist the other and to leave its characteristic quality untouched, if good progress is to be made in the general and complete culture of the whole. The recognition of this ought to come first from the mother-country, which has been endowed in the first place with the sense of profundity. But if ever foreign countries, in their blindness to this relationship, should be so far carried away by what appears on the surface as to attempt to deprive their mother-country of its independence and so to destroy and absorb it, they would thereby, if their attempt succeeded, sever for themselves the last vein connecting them with nature and with life, and fall defenceless into spiritual death, which indeed, apart from this, has been revealing itself to be their true nature more and more clearly as time has gone on. Then the hitherto continuous stream of the development of our race would be in fact at an end; barbarism would be bound to begin again and to go on without hope of deliverance, until we were all living in caves again like wild beasts and, like them, devouring one another. That this is really so and must inevitably follow, only the German can see, of course, and only he shall see it. To the foreigner, who, since he knows no foreign culture, has unlimited scope to admire himself in his own, it must and it may always appear preposterous blasphemy proceeding from ill-educated ignorance.

Non-German countries are the earth, from which fruitful vapours detach themselves and arise to the clouds, and by which even now the old gods condemned to Tartarus keep in touch with the sphere of life. The mother-country is the eternal sky enveloping the earth, the sky in which the light vapours are condensed to clouds