Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/95

 all its parts proceeding from, and referred back to, one central point; but they rather resemble a cloud of sand in which each grain is a whole to itself, and which is only held together by the inconstant wind. It seems a master-stroke of invention in such an Age to hit upon the mode of communicating knowledge after the order of the letters of the alphabet. Hence its representations can never possess clearness; the want of which is supplied by a tiresome perspicacity amounting to nothing more than frequent repetition of the same thing. Wherever this Age attains to its full efficiency, this mode of communication even comes to understand itself and to represent itself as worthy of imitation; so that from thenceforward elegance is placed in neither giving the reader the trouble of thinking for himself, nor in any way calling forth his own independent activity, which indeed is considered obtrusive;—and the classical writings of the Age are those which every one may read without preparation, and peruse, and lay aside, and still remain exactly what he was before. Not so he who has Ideas to communicate and who is moved by Ideas to such communication. Not he himself speaks, but the Idea speaks, or writes, in him with indwelling power;—and that only is a good discourse wherein the speaker does not so much declare the thought, as the thought declares itself by the organ of the speaker. That such discourses have been delivered, at least in former times, and that it has not always been the fashion to avoid arousing independent thought in the mind of the hearer or reader, is proved by the writings which are left to us of classical antiquity; the study of which, indeed, and of the languages in which they are written, will be discountenanced and discarded by the Third Age wherever it acts consequentially,—in order that its own productions alone may be held in honour and esteem.

The Idea, and the Idea only, fills, satisfies, and blesses the mind:—an Age without the Idea must therefore