Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/165

 special law of divine development. It is the subjection in common to this special law that unites this mass in the eternal world, and therefore in the temporal also, to a natural totality permeated by itself. The significance of this law itself can indeed be comprehended as a whole, as we have comprehended it by the instance of the Germans as an original people; it can even be better understood in many of its further provisions by considering the manifestations of such a people; but it can never be completely grasped by the mind of anyone, for everyone continually remains under its influence unknown to himself, although, in general, it can be clearly seen that such a law exists. This law is a ‘something more’ of the world of images, that coalesces absolutely in the phenomenal world with the ‘something more’ of the world of originality that cannot be imaged; hence, in the phenomenal world neither can be separated again from the other. That law determines entirely and completes what has been called the national character of a people—that law of the development of the original and divine. From this it is clear that men who, as is the case with what we have described as the foreign spirit, do not believe at all in something original nor in its continuous development, but only in an eternal recurrence of apparent life, and who by their belief become what they believe, are in the higher sense not a people at all. As they in fact, properly speaking, do not exist, they are just as little capable of having a national character.

115. The noble-minded man’s belief in the eternal continuance of his influence even on this earth is thus founded on the hope of the eternal continuance of the people from which he has developed, and on the characteristic of that people as indicated in the hidden law of which we have spoken, without admixture of, or corruption