Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/290

 you as you possibly could; to be called lunatics, or advised to betake themselves to a madhouse, was the thanks they could most generally reckon on getting from you. They for their part did not dare to express themselves about you with the same frankness, because they were dependent on you; but, in their inmost hearts, their true opinion of you was this, that with few exceptions you are shallow babblers and puffed-up braggarts, half-educated men who merely ran through a course at school, blind men who have to feel their way and creep along in the old groove, and who neither want nor are capable of anything else. By your actions convict them of lying. For this purpose seize the opportunity now offered to you; lay aside your contempt of profound thought and science; let yourselves be told what you do not know, then listen and learn; otherwise your accusers will carry their point.

224. These addresses appeal solemnly to you, thinkers, scholars, and men of letters, to such of you as are still worthy of the name. The reproach that men of affairs brought against you was in a certain sense not unjust. Often you went on in the sphere of pure thought too unconcernedly, without troubling yourselves about the actual world, or trying to find out how the two might be brought into connection; you described your own world, and left the actual one too much alone, despising and scorning it. It is true that all regulation and formation of actual life must proceed from a higher regulating idea, and that going along in the accustomed way is not enough; that is an eternal truth, and in God’s name crushes with unconcealed contempt everyone who dares to occupy himself with affairs without knowing this. Nevertheless, between the idea and the act of introducing it into every separate form of life there lies a great gulf. To fill up