Page:Dawn of the Day.pdf/228

192 piety towards everything in existence tried to dissolve itself into piety towards everything that had existed, for the sole purpose that heart and mind might again be filled and leave no space for future and later aims. The worship of feeling took the place of the worship of reason, and the German musicians, the consummate artists in all that is invisible, fanciful, legendary, malcontent, were more successful in building up the new temple than all the artists in words and thoughts. If we take it into consideration that innumerable good things have been separately uttered and explored, and many things have since been more fairly judged than ever before: there yet remains this to be said of the sun total, that it was a general risk by no means small under the semblance of a full and final knowledge of the past, to place knowledge altogether below feeling, and by way of using the words of Kant, who thus defined his special task—"again to pave the way for belief by fixing the limits of knowledge." We may again breathe freely: the hour of this danger has passed! And, strange to say, those very spirits which the Germans had so eloquently conjured up, proved in the long run most harmful to the intentions of their conjurors; history, the comprehension of origin and development, the sympathy with the past, the newly stirred up passion of feeling and knowledge, after having been for some time helpmates of the obscuring, vague, retrograde spirit, one day assumed a new nature and are now soaring on outstretched wings past their conjurors,