Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/89

 different in different languages and will depend on the difference in the relation that has existed and continues to exist between the sensuous and intellectual development of the people speaking a language.

49. We shall next illustrate this observation, clear though it is in itself, by an example. Anything that arises, according to the conception of the fundamental impulse explained in the preceding address, directly in clear perception and not in the first place in dim feeling—anything of this kind, and it is always a supersensuous object, is denoted by a Greek word which is frequently used in the German language also; it is called an Idea [German, Idee]; and this word conveys exactly the same sensuous image as the word Gesicht in German, which occurs in the following expressions in Luther’s translation of the Bible: Ye shall see visions [Gesichte], ye shall dream dreams. Idea or Vision, in its sensuous meaning, would be something that could be perceived only by the bodily eye and not by any other sense such as taste, hearing, etc.; it would be such a thing as a rainbow, or the forms which pass before us in dreams. Idea or Vision, in its supersensuous meaning, would denote, first of all, in conformity with the sphere in which the word is to be valid, something that cannot be perceived by the body at all, but only by the mind; and then, something that cannot, as many other things can, be perceived by the dim feeling of the mind, but only by the eye of the mind, by clear perception. Further, even if one were inclined to assume that for the Greeks the basis of this sensuous designation was certainly the rainbow and similar phenomena, one would have to admit that their sensuous perception had already advanced to the stage of noticing this difference between things, viz., that some reveal themselves to all or several senses and others to