Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/77

 to time, this is the very time, and that now the race is exactly midway between the two great epochs of its life on earth. But, in regard to space, we believe that it is first of all the Germans who are called upon to begin the new era as pioneers and models for the rest of mankind.

37. Yet even this wholly new creation will not result as a sudden change from what has gone before; it is rather, especially with the Germans, the true natural continuation and consequence of the past. It is apparent and, I believe, generally granted that the impulse and effort of the age has been seeking to dispel dim feelings and to secure the sole mastery for clearness and knowledge. This effort has been quite successful at least in this, that it has completely revealed the nothingness of the past. The impulse towards clearness should not be rooted out, nor should dull acquiescence in dim feeling again obtain the mastery. Rather must this impulse be developed still further and introduced into higher spheres, so that when the Nothing has been revealed, the Something, the positive truth that sets up something real, may likewise become manifest. The world of given and self-forming existence, which arises from dim feeling, has been submerged and shall remain below the surface. The world, however, which arises from original clearness, the world of existence that is ever to be evolved from the mind, shall dawn and shine forth in its splendour.

38. Truly the prophecy of a new life in such forms will probably seem strange to our age, which would scarcely have the courage to take this promise to itself, if it were to look solely at the tremendous difference between its own prevailing opinions on these matters and those which have been expressed as principles of the new era. I will not speak of the education which in the past, as a rule, only the higher classes received, as a