Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/157

 the eternal development of this spirituality by freedom, wherever he may have been born and whatever language he speaks, is of our blood; he is one of us, and will come over to our side. Whoever believes in stagnation, retrogression, and the round dance of which we spoke, or who sets a dead nature at the helm of the world’s government, wherever he may have been born and whatever language he speaks, is non-German and a stranger to us; and it is to be wished that he would separate himself from us completely, and the sooner the better.

108. So, too, at this point let there appear before you at last, and unmistakably, what that philosophy, which with good reason calls itself the German philosophy, really wants, and wherein it is strictly, earnestly, and inexorably opposed to any foreign philosophy that believes in death. The German philosophy has as its support what we said above about freedom; and he that still hath ears to hear, let him hear. Let it appear before you, not in the least with the intention of making the dead understand it, which is impossible, but so that it may be harder for the dead to twist its words, and to make out that they themselves want more or less the same thing and at bottom are of the same mind. This German philosophy does, indeed, raise itself by the act of thinking—not merely boasting about it, in accordance with a dim notion that it ought to be so, without being able to put it into practice—it raises itself to the ‘more than all infinity’ that is unchangeable, and in this alone it finds true being. It perceives time and eternity and infinity in their rise from the appearing and becoming visible of that One which is in itself invisible and which is only comprehended, rightly comprehended, in this invisibility. Even infinity is, according to this philosophy, nothing in itself, and there is in it no true being whatever. It is solely the means