Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/187

 conception of its earthly life as eternal and of the fatherland as the support of that eternity. If it is produced in the Germans, it will include love of the German fatherland as one of its essential elements, and from that love there spring of themselves the courageous defender of his country and the peaceful and honest citizen. Such an education, indeed, achieves even more than that immediate object; that is always the case when thoroughgoing measures are willed for a great purpose; the whole man is inwardly perfected and completed in every part, and outwardly equipped with perfect fitness for all his purposes in time and eternity. Spiritual nature has inseparably connected our complete cure from all the evils that oppress us with our recovery as a nation and fatherland.

132. We have nothing more to do here with the stupid surprise of some, when we assert such a world of pure thought, and assert it, indeed, as the only possible world, and reject the world of sense; nor have we anything more to do with those who deny the former world altogether, or deny only the possibility that the majority of the people at large can be brought into it. We have already completely rejected these things. He who does not yet know that there is a world of thought can instruct himself meanwhile about it elsewhere by the available means; we have no time for that instruction here. But we do intend just this; to show how even the majority of the people at large can be raised into that world.

133. Now, in our deliberate opinion the idea of such a new education is not to be considered as simply a picture set up for the exercise of ingenuity of mind or of skill in argument, but is rather to be put into practice at once and introduced into life. Our task, therefore,