Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/280

 for reflection, and yet cannot use his will to-day, will be still less able to do so to-morrow. Every delay makes us all the more indolent, and cradles us still more deeply in the habit of familiarity with our wretched condition. Then, too, the external motives to reflection can never be stronger or more urgent. He who is not aroused by the present situation has beyond a doubt lost all power of feeling. You are convoked to make a firm and final resolution and decision; and in no wise to give a command, an order, an incitement to others, but an incitement to yourselves. You must make a resolution of a kind which each one can carry out only by himself and in his own person. In this matter the leisurely indication of an intention does not suffice, nor the will to exert a will at some future time, nor yet the indolent resolve to submit some time or other to what is proposed, if one should meanwhile of one’s self have become a better man. No, you are called upon to make a resolve that will itself be part of your life, a resolve that is itself a deed within you, that endures there and continues to hold sway without being moved or shaken, a resolve that never grows cold, until it has attained its object.

216. Or is, perchance, the root, from which alone such a resolution can spring and have an influence on life, completely destroyed, and has it disappeared? Is your whole being in truth and in fact thinned and reduced to an empty shadow, without sap and blood and power of motion; reduced to a dream in which bright visions are begotten and busily pursue each other, but where the body lies stiff and as it were dead? This age has long been told to its face, and has heard it repeated in every shape and form, that this or something like it is the general opinion. Its spokesmen have believed that people who said this only wanted to slander them, and have regarded