Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/211

Rh the senses the world for the truly wise man? Because it is but the embodiment of one eternal and divine spirit. Then follows a Schellingian sketch of a process of evolution which, proceeding through the animals, culminates in us. The world of nature is thus full of the struggle of the great spirit to win his own higher life. The end and crown of this whole process is man. In him, blind nature gets a voice; in him the spirit comes to himself. And all the universe is one glorious life, in whose contemplation the mystic soul rejoices.

Let me give you, as a close, my own hasty rendering ot some of Schelling's curious lines, with a certain effort to preserve the unequal metre and even the very unequal worth of the original. The Knittelvers, at its noblest, is only a sort of glorified doggerel, and is never easy to manage in translation; but I must suggest to you a little of the romantic intoxication of this sort of pantheism, so characteristic of one great tendency in German thought.

After his introductory denunciation of priestcraft, asceticism, and superstition, the gay Heinz is made to run on thus, speaking of course in character: —


 * “Therefore religion I forsake,
 * All superstitious ties I break,
 * No church will I visit to hear them preach,
 * I have done with all that the parsons teach.
 * And yet there is one faith that masters my will,
 * Glows in my verse, and inspires me still.
 * Daily my heart with delight doth thrill,
 * Eternally showing
 * New form; till I knowing,
 * This faith so clear.
 * This light so near,
 * This poem undying,
 * Must witness its truth beyond denying;
 * So that I can nothing hold nor conceive
 * Save what it counsels me to believe;
 * Nor aught as certain or right maintain,
 * Save what it reveals to my eyes so plain.