Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/147

 that higher education. So this German and very modern art of the State becomes once more the very ancient art of the State, which among the Greeks founded citizenship on education and trained such citizens as succeeding ages have never seen. Henceforth the German will do what is in form the same, though in content it will be characterized by a spirit that is not narrow and exclusive, but universal and cosmopolitan.

98. That foreign spirit to which we have referred prevails among the great majority of our people in another matter, viz., their view of the whole life of a human race and of history as the picture of that life. A nation whose language has a dead and completed foundation can only advance, as we showed on a previous occasion, to a certain stage of development in all the departments of rhetoric. That stage depends on the foundation of the language, and the nation will experience a golden age. Unless such a nation is extremely modest and self-depreciative, it cannot fittingly think more highly of the whole race than it does of itself, from its own knowledge; hence, it must assume that there will be a final, highest, and for ever unsurpassable goal for all human development. Just as those animal species, the beavers and the bees, still build in the way they built thousands of years ago, and have made no progress in the art during that long period of time, so it will be, according to that nation, with the animal species called man in all branches of his development. These branches, impulses, and capacities it will be possible to survey exhaustively, and indeed to see on examining a few members; and then it will be possible to indicate the highest development of each one of them. Perhaps the human species will be far worse off than the bee or beaver species; for, though the latter learn nothing new, they nevertheless do not deteriorate