Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/75

 is to be, an a priori world that exists in the future and ever remains in the future. The divine life, therefore, that underlies all appearance reveals itself never as a fixed and known entity, but as something that is to be; and after it has become what it was to be, it will reveal itself again to all eternity as something that is to be. This divine life, then, never appears in the death of the fixed entity, but remains continually in the form of ever-flowing life. The direct appearance and manifestation of God is love. The interpretation of this love by knowledge first fixes an existence, an existence that ever is to be; this is the only real world, in so far as a world can be real. The other world, on the contrary, which is given and found existing by us, is but the shadow and phantom, out of which knowledge builds up for its interpretation of love a fixed form and a visible body. This other world is the means for, and the condition of, the perception of the higher world that is in itself invisible. Not even in that higher world does God reveal Himself directly, but there too only through the medium of the one, pure, unchangeable, and formless love; it is in this love alone that He appears directly. To this love there is joined intuitive knowledge, which brings with it an image drawn from itself, with which to clothe the object of love that is in itself invisible. Yet each time it is opposed by love, and thereby stimulated again to make a new form, which is once again opposed in just the same way. Only thus, by fusion with intuition, does love too, which purely in itself is one and quite incapable of progress, of infinity, and of eternity, become like it eternal and infinite. The image mentioned just now, which is supplied from knowledge itself, considered by itself alone and without application to the love that is clearly perceived, is the fixed and given world, or nature. The