Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/142

 and how it is only in accordance with this law that life attains Being and becomes a Something. In the view of this philosophy, Being arises, whereas the other presupposes it. So, then, this philosophy is in a very special sense German only—that is, original. Vice versa, if anyone were but a true German, he could not philosophize in any way but this.

93. That system of thought, although it dominates the majority of those who philosophize in German, is nevertheless not really a German system. Yet, whether it is consciously set up as a true system of philosophical doctrine, or whether, unknown to us, it is merely the basis for the rest of our thinking, it influences the other scientific views of the age. Indeed, it is a main effort of our age, stimulated by foreign countries as we are, not merely to lay hold of the material of science with the memory, as our forefathers may be said to have done, but to turn it over in our own independent thought and to philosophize upon it. So far as the effort is concerned, our age is in the right; but when, in the execution of this philosophizing, it proceeds, as is to be expected, from the death-creed of foreign philosophy, it will be in the wrong. In this place we propose to glance only at those sciences which are most closely connected with our whole plan, and to trace the foreign ideas and views which are so widespread in them.

94. In holding that the establishment and government of States should be looked upon as an independent art having its own fixed rules, non-German countries have undoubtedly served us as forerunners, and they themselves found their pattern in antiquity. But what will be regarded as the art of the State by such a non-German country, which in its language, the very element of its thinking and willing, has a support that is fixed, closed, and dead?