Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/148

 in their art, whereas man, when he has once reached the summit, is hurled back again, and may struggle for hundreds or thousands of years to regain the point at which it would have been better to leave him undisturbed. The human species, so these people think, will undoubtedly have attained such culminating points in education in the past, and enjoyed more than one golden age; to discover these points in history, to judge all the efforts of humanity by them, and to lead humanity back to them, will be their most strenuous endeavour. According to them, history was finished long ago and has been finished several times already. According to them, there is nothing new under the sun, for they have destroyed the source of eternal life under and over the sun, and only let eternally-recurring death repeat itself and subside time after time.

99. It is well known that this philosophy of history has come to us from foreign countries, although it is dying away even there at the present day and has become almost exclusively German property. From this closer kinship it follows also that this philosophy of history, which we call ours, is able to understand the efforts of foreign countries through and through; and, although this view of history is no longer expressed very often in those countries, they go beyond expression, for they are acting in accordance with it and constructing once more a golden age. This philosophy is even able to prophesy, and to point out to them the path they have still to take; it can pay them the tribute of genuine admiration, which one who thinks as a German cannot pretend to do. Indeed, how could he? Golden ages are to him in every respect a limitation proceeding from a state of death. Gold may indeed be the most precious metal in the lap of dead earth, he thinks, but the stuff of the living spirit