Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/265

 a man who works with such tools as these all the arts of seduction, persuasion, and deception will be in vain. Only from a distance can such men deceive anyone; as soon as they are seen at close quarters, their brutal roughness and their shameless and insolent lust for booty will be obvious even to the feeblest mind; and the detestation of the whole human race will cry aloud upon them. With such tools as these one can indeed plunder and lay waste the earth, and grind it down to stupor and chaos, but one can never establish it as a universal monarchy.

205. The ideas we have mentioned, and all ideas of this kind, are products of a form of thinking which merely plays a game with itself and sometimes, too, gets caught in its own cobwebs—a form of thinking which is unworthy of German thoroughness and earnestness. At best, some of these ideas, as, for example, that of a political equilibrium, are serviceable guiding-lines to enable one to find one’s way about in the extensive and confused multiplicity of phenomena and to set it in order; but to believe that these things exist in nature, or to strive to realize them, is the same as to expect to find the poles, the meridians, and the tropics, by which our survey of the earth is guided, actually marked and indicated on the surface of the globe. May it become the custom in our nation, not merely to think idly and as it were experimentally, just to see what will come of it, but to think in such a way that what we think shall be true and have a real effect in life! Then it will be superfluous to warn people against such phantoms of a political wisdom whose origin is foreign and which only deludes the Germans.

This thoroughness, earnestness, and weightiness in our way of thinking, once we have made it our own, will show itself in our life as well. We are defeated; whether