Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/95

 which is its literal translation, he would have understood us without further historical explanation, but he would have said: “Well, to be a man [Mensch] and not a wild beast is not very much after all.” Now it may be that no Roman would ever have said that; but the German would say it, because in his language manhood [Menschheit] has remained an idea of the senses only and has never become a symbol of a supersensuous idea as it did among the Romans. Our ancestors had taken note of the separate human virtues and designated them symbolically in language perhaps long before it occurred to them to combine them in a single concept as contrasted with animal nature; and that is no discredit to our ancestors as compared with the Romans. Now anyone who, in spite of this, wished to introduce that foreign and Roman symbol artificially and, as it were, by a trick into the language of the Germans, would obviously be lowering their ethical standard in passing on to them as distinguished and commendable something which may perhaps be so in the foreign language, but which the German, in accordance with the ineradicable nature of his national power of imagination, only regards as something already known and indispensable. A closer examination might enable us to demonstrate that those Teutonic races which adopted the Latin language experienced, even in the beginning, similar degradations of their former ethical standard because of inappropriate foreign symbols; but on this circumstance we do not now wish to lay too great a stress.

Further, if in speaking to the German, instead of the words Popularity [Popularität] and Liberality [Liberalität], I should use the expressions, “striving for favour with the great mob,” and “not having the mind of a slave,” which is how they must be literally translated,