Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/53

 welfare, whether in the present or in some future life. Apart from this fact, we have already seen that this method is no longer applicable to us, because the motives of fear and hope serve no longer with us but against us, and material love of self cannot be turned to our advantage in any way. We are, therefore, compelled by necessity to wish to mould men who are inwardly and fundamentally good, since it is through such men alone that the German nation can still continue to exist, whereas through bad men it will inevitably be absorbed in the outside world. Therefore, in place of that love of self, with which nothing for our good can be connected any longer, we must set up and establish in the hearts of all those whom we wish to reckon among our nation that other kind of love, which is concerned directly with the good, simply as such and for its own sake.

We have already seen that love of the good, simply as such and not for the sake of any advantage to ourselves, takes the form of pleasure in it; a pleasure so intense that a man is thereby stimulated to realize the good in his life. It is this intense pleasure, therefore, which the new education should produce as its pupil’s stable and constant character. Then this pleasure itself would inevitably be the foundation of the pupil’s constant good will.

17. A pleasure that stimulates us to bring about a certain state of affairs which does not yet actually exist presupposes an image of that state which, previous to its actual existence, hovers before the mind and attracts that pleasure which stimulates to realization. This pleasure, therefore, presupposes in the individual who is to be affected by it the power to create spontaneously such images, which are independent of reality and not copies of it, but rather its prototypes. I must now speak of this power, and I