Page:Novalis Schriften - Volume 2.djvu/141

★ 131 ★ Gross self-interest is the necessary result of impoverished narrow-mindedness. The sensation of the moment is the liveliest, the highest one for a wretch. He doesn't know anything higher than this. No wonder that his intellect, trained by external circumstances, is only the crafty slave of such an obtuse master, and only contemplates and cares for his own lusts.

78. In the early times of the discovery of the faculty of judgement, every new judgment was a find. The value of this find rose, the more applicable, the more fruitful this judgment was. Sentences that now seem very common to us now were the results of an unusual degree of intellect. One had to summon genius and perspicacity in order to find new relationships by means of the new tool. Its application to the most curious, most interesting, and most universal aspects of humanity must have aroused deep admiration and attracted the attention of all good minds. This is how those gnomic masses came into being, which have been so highly valued through all times and by all the people of the nation. It is quite possible that a time will come when they all are so ordinary, as like proverbs are now, and new, more sublime discoveries occupy humanity's restless spirit that our present ingenious discoveries would meet a similar fate in the course of time.

79. A law is, by the concept itself, effective. An ineffective law is not a law. Law is a causal concept, a combination of power and thought. Hence one is never conscious of a law as such. Insofar as one thinks of a law, it is only a proposition, that is, a thought connected with a capability. A resistant, a