Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/202

 consideration belongs to the characteristics of the Present, or of any preceding Age. Should this latter assertion surprise any one who thinks of the loud talk about Art, and the promotion of Art, current in the present day even among our great men, we would entreat such an one to consider that this talk cannot have escaped us; that as little can it have escaped us that twice,—first, by a peculiar concourse of circumstances, among which one at least can never re-appear, and a second time, from the Christian Church, there has burst forth a morning-dawn of Art, the beams of which continue to illumine our present day though with a reflected splendour; but that nevertheless the expression Fine Art, and particularly a Fine Art pervading the whole nation and every branch of its activity, has with us a signification quite different from the common one; of which meaning we have here neither time nor opportunity to give such a full account as is requisite for its proper comprehension.

Thus far, and no farther, extends the legitimate promotion of the purposes of Reason by means of the State while the latter appears to be occupied solely with the pursuit of its own purpose. The higher branches of the Culture of Reason,—Religion, Science, Virtue,—can never become purposes of the State. Not Religion:—We do not here speak of the superstitious fear of God as a Being hostile to man, which ancient nations conjured up from their own thoughts in order that they might propitiate this dreadful Being in name of the nation and so establish National Religions:—with this we have nothing to do at present. The True Religion is as old as creation, and therefore older than any State. It was one of the arrangements of that Providence which watches over the development of our Race that this True Religion should, at the proper time, reappear from out the obscurity in which it had previously lain concealed, and