Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/144

 95. This view of the art of the State enforces respect by its iron consistency and by an appearance of sublimity which falls upon it; and up to a certain point, especially when the whole tendency is towards a monarchical constitution, and one that is always becoming more purely monarchical, it renders good service. But, when it reaches that point, its impotence is apparent to everyone. I will suppose that you have made your machine as perfect as you intended, and that each and every lower part of it is unceasingly and irresistibly compelled by a higher part, which is itself compelled to compel, and so on up to the top. But how will your final part, from which proceeds the whole compelling power present in the machine, be itself compelled to compel? Suppose you have overcome absolutely all the resistance to the mainspring that might arise from the friction of the various parts, and suppose you have given that mainspring a power against which all other power vanishes to nothing, which is all you could do even by mechanism, and suppose you have thus created a supremely powerful monarchical constitution; how are you going to set this mainspring itself in motion and compel it without exception to see the right and to will it? Tell me how you are going to bring perpetual motion into your clockwork, which, though properly designed and constructed, does not go. Is, perhaps, as you sometimes say in your embarrassment, the whole machine itself to react and to set its own mainspring in motion? Either this happens by a power that itself proceeds from the stimulus of the mainspring; or else it happens by a power that does not proceed thence, but is to be found in the whole thing independent of the mainspring. No third way is possible. If you suppose the first, you find yourselves reasoning in a circle, and your principles of mechanics are in a circle too; the