Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/225

Rh order, the Allgemeinheit and Heiterkeit, the completeness and serenity of a watchful, exigent intellectualism. Im Ganzen, Guten, Wahren, resolut zu leben, is Goethe's description of his own higher life; and what is meant by life in the whole, im Ganzen? It means the life of one for whom, over and over again, what was once precious has become indifferent. Every one who aims at the life of culture is met by many forms of it, arising out of the intense, laborious, one-sided development of some special talent. They are the brightest enthusiasms the world has to show. They do not care to weigh the claims which this or that alien form of culture makes upon them. But the pure instinct of self-culture cares not so much to reap all that these forms of culture can give, as to find in them its own strength. The demand of the intellect is to feel itself alive. It must see into the laws, the operation, the intellectual reward of every divided form of culture; but only that it may measure the relation between itself and them. It struggles with those forms till its secret is won from each, and then lets each fall back into its place in the supreme, artistic view of life. With a kind of passionate coldness such natures rejoice to be away from and past their former selves. Above all, they are jealous of that abandonment to one special gift which really limits their capabilities. It would