Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/238

 to nature and truth, and throw away foreign contrivances; in a word, we must provide character for ourselves; for to have character and to be German [Charakter haben und deutsch sein] undoubtedly mean the same; and the thing has no special name in our language, because it is intended to proceed immediately from our very existence without any knowledge or reflection on our part.

182. We must first of all set our own thoughts to work and think about the great events of our days, their relation to us, and what we have to expect from them; and we must provide ourselves with a firm and clear view of all these matters, and a definite and unchangeable Yes or No in answer to the questions that arise out of them. Everyone who makes the slightest claim to culture is bound to do that. The animal life of man proceeds in all ages according to the same laws, and in this every age is alike. Only to the understanding are there such things as different ages; and only the man whose conception penetrates them lives in them, and only he exists in his own age; any other kind of life is nothing but the life of plants and animals. To let everything that happens pass by one unperceived, perhaps to close eye and ear diligently to its urgent message, and even to boast of such thoughtlessness as if it were great wisdom—this may be the proper thing for a rock on which the waves of the sea beat without its feeling them, or for a tree-trunk dashed to and fro by storms without its perceiving them; but in no wise does it beseem a thinking being. Even the thinker who dwells in the higher spheres is not absolved from this general obligation of understanding his own age. Everything that is on the higher plane must want to influence the immediate present in its own fashion; and he who truly lives in the former lives at the same time in the latter also; if he did not live in the latter