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feeling or instinct. In a sense, all subsequent history is but a return to this primitive condition. But "humanity must make the journey on its own feet; by its own strength it must bring itself back to that state in which it was once without its own coöperating labor. . . . If humanity does not recreate its own true being, it has no real life." While philosophy compels us to assume a Normal People who, by "the mere fact of their existence, without science and art, found themselves in a state of perfectly developed reason," there is no ground for not admitting the existence at the same time of "timid and rude earth-born savages." Thus the original state of humanity would have been one of the greatest possible inequality, being divided between the Normal Folk existing as a manifestation of Reason and the wild and savage races of barbarism.
In his later period of inflamed patriotism this innocuous speculation grew a sting. He had determined that the present age—the Europe of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution—is the age of liberation from the external authority in which Reason had presented itself in the second age. Hence it is inherently negative: "an age of absolute indifference toward the Truth, an age of entire and unrestrained licentiousness." But the further evolution of the Divine Idea demands a Folk which has retained the primitive principle of Reason, which may redeem, therefore, the corrupt and rebellious modes of humanity elsewhere existing. Since the Germans are this saving remnant, they are the Urvolk, the Normal Nation, of the modern period. From this point on, idealization of past Germanic history and appeal to the nation to realize its unique calling by victory over Napoleon blend.
The Fichtean scaffolding tumbled, but these ideas persisted. I doubt if it is possible to exaggerate the extent to which German history has been systematically idealized for the last hundred years. Technically speaking, the Romantic movement may have passed away and an age of scientific history dawned. Actually the detailed facts have been depicted by use of the palette of Romanticism. Space permits but one illustration which would be but a literary curiosity were it not fairly typical. Tacitus called his account of the northern barbarians Germania—an unfortunate title in view of later developments. The characteristics assigned by him to the German tribes are such as any anthropologist could duplicate from any warlike barbaric tribe. Yet over and over again these traits (which Tacitus idealized as Cooper, say, idealized the North American Indian traits) are made the basis of the philosophic history of the German people. The Germans, for example, had that psychological experience now known as mana, manitou, tabu, etc. They identified their gods, in Tacitus' phrase, with "that mystery which they perceive by experiencing sacred fear." This turns out to be the germinal deposit of spiritual-mindedness which later showed itself in Luther and in the peculiar genius of the Germans for religious experience.
The following words are from no less an authority than Pfleiderer:
"Cannot we recognize in this point that truly German characteristic of Innerlichkeit which scorns to fix for sensuous perception the divine something which makes itself felt in the depths of the sensitive soul, which scorns to drag down the sublime mystery of the unknowable to the vulgar distinctness of earthly things? The fact that the Germans attached but little importance to religious ceremonies accords with this view."
To others, this sense of mystery is a prophetic anticipation of the Kantian thing-in-itself.
A similar treatment has been accorded to the personal and voluntary bond by which individuals attached themselves to a chieftain. Thus early was marked out the fidelity or loyalty, Treue, which is uniquely Germanic—although some warlike tribes among our Indians carried the system still further. I can allow myself but one more example of the way in which the philosophic sophistication of history has worked. No historian can be unconscious of the extent to which European culture has been genuinely European—the extent to which it derives itself from a common heritage of the ancient world and the extent to which intermixtures and borrowings of culture have gone on ever since. As to Germany, however, these obvious facts have to be accommodated to the doctrine of an original racial deposit steadily evolving from within.
The method is simple. As respects Germany, these cultural borrowings and crosses represent the intrinsic universality of its genius. Through this universality, the German spirit finds itself at home everywhere. Consequently, it consciously appropriates and assimilates what other peoples have produced by a kind of blind unconscious instinct. Thus it was German thought which revealed the truth of Hellenic culture, and rescued essential Christianity from its Romanized petrifaction. The principle of Reason which French enlightenment laid hold of only in its negative and destructive aspect, the German spirit grasped in its positive and constructive form. Shakespeare happened to be born in England, but only the Germans have apprehended him in his spiritual universality so that he is now more his own than he is England's—and so on. But with respect to other peoples, similar borrowings reveal only their lack of inner and essential selfhood. While Luther is universal because he is German, Shakespeare is universal because he is not English.
I have intimated that Fichte's actual influence was limited. But his basic ideas of the State and of history were absorbed in the philosophy of Hegel, and Hegel for a considerable period absolutely dominated German thinking. To set forth the ground principles of his "absolute idealism" would be only to repeat what has already been said. Its chief difference, aside from Hegel's encyclopedic knowledge, his greater concrete historic interest and his more conservative temperament, is his bottomless scorn for an Idea, an Absolute, which merely ought to be and which is only going to be realized after a period of time. "The Actual is the Rational and the Rational is the Actual"—and the actual means the actuating force and movement of things. It is customary to call him an Idealist. In one sense of much abused terms, he is the greatest realist known to philosophy. He might be called a Brutalist. In the inquiry Bourdon carried on in Germany a few years ago (published under the title of the "German Enigma"), he records a conversation with a German who deplores the tendency of the Germans to forsake the solid bone of things in behalf of a romantic shadow. As against this he appeals to the realistic sense of Hegel, who, "in opposition to the idealism which had lifted Germany on wings, arrayed and marshaled the maxims of an unflinching realism. He had formulæ for the justification of facts whatever they might be. That which is, he would say, is reason realized. And what did he teach? That the hour has sounded for the third act in the drama of humanity, and that the German opportunity is not far off. . . . I could show you throughout the nineteenth century the torrent of political and social ideas which had their source here."
I have said that the essential points of the Fichtean philosophy of history were taken up into the Hegelian system. This assimilation involved, however, a rectification of an inconsistency between the earlier and the later moral theories of Fichte. In his earlier ethical writings, emphasis fell upon conscious moral personality—upon the deliberate identification by the individual will of its career and destiny with the purpose of the Absolute. In his later patriotic philosophy, he asserts that the organized nation is the channel by which a finite ego acquires moral personality, since the nation alone transmits to individuals the generic principle of God working in humanity. At the same time he appeals to the resolute will and consciously chosen self-sacrifice of individuals to overthrow the enemy and re-establish the Prussian state. When Hegel writes that victory has been obtained, the war of Independence has been successfully waged. The necessity of emphasizing individual self-assertion had given way to the need of subordinating the individual to the established state in order to check the disintegrating tendencies of liberalism.
Haym has said that Hegel's "Philosophy of Law" had for its task the exhibition as the perfect work of Absolute Reason up to date of the "practical and political condition existing in Prussia in 1821." This was meant as a hostile attack. But Hegel himself should have been the last to object. With his scorn for an Ideal so impotent that its realization must depend upon the effort of private selves, an Absolute so inconsequential that it must wait upon the accidents of future time for manifestation, he sticks in politics more than elsewhere to the conviction that the actual is the rational. "The task of philosophy is to comprehend that which is, for that which is, is Reason." Alleged philosophies which try to tell what the State should be or even what a state ought in the future to come to be, are idle fantasies. Such attempts come too late. Human wisdom is like "the bird of Minerva which takes its flight only at the close of day."6