Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/118

106 phenomenon; we are surrounded by phenomena and by phenomena only. We are nothing but images for each other. When we die the image remains in the consciousness of others, because it was the only thing of us which was ever there.

We know also that the ideals which in olden times were localised and converted into the qualities of a supernatural person, the greatest liberty, the highest justice, &c., are mere images, never realised anywhere or at any time, and that they will never be fully realised anywhere; we know that they have no other existence than that which our manner of thought and action give them. They exist only in so far as we love them. But we love them only so far as we labour for them.

The highest love is a pain, which we soothe by living and working for the object of our love.

That Poland's whole intellectual life is absorbed in the question of the existence of the Polish nationality is therefore not so poor a cause as it seems; for Poland, in the historical development of relations, has become synonymous with the right of mankind to civil and intellectual freedom and with the right of nations to independence. Poland is synonymous with our hope or our illusion as to the advance of our age in culture. Its future coincides with the future of civilisation. Its final destruction would be synonymous with the victory of modern, military barbarism in Europe.