Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Early Writings I

Translated from German

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Early Writings I. Edited by Friedhelm Nicolin and Gisela Schüler. Collected Works, Volume 1. 1989. Published by Felix Meiner Publishing House, Hamburg and The Rhenish-Westphalian Academy of Sciences in cooperation with the German Research Foundation and the Hegel Commission of the Rhenish-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and the Hegel Archive of Ruhr University Bochum.

Diary (1785–1787)

Works from the Gymnasium Years: An Essay from the Tübingen Seminary (1785–1788)
Conversation Between Three Persons
Some Remarks on the Representation of Magnitude
On the Religion of the Greeks and Romans
On Some Characteristic Differences Among the Ancient Poets
From a Speech Given at Graduation from the Gymnasium
On Some Benefits We Gain from Reading the Classical Greek and Roman Authors

Four Sermons (1792–1793)
First Sermon
Second Sermon
Third Sermon
Fourth Sermon

Studies (1792/93–1794)
In What Respect Is Religion…
But the Principle Material…
Our Tradition…
Already in the Architecture…
Religion Is One of the Most Important Matters…
Aside from Oral Instruction…
It Cannot Be Denied…
The Constitutions of States…
How Little Objective Religion…
Public Authority…
On the Difference in the Scene of Death
On Objective Religion…
It Would Be a Difficult Task…
When One Speaks of the Christian Religion…
Today the Masses Need…

A Manuscript on Psychology and Transcendental Philosophy (1794)
On Psychology and Transcendental Philosophy

Studies (1795)
The Transcendental Idea…
Ignorance of History…
In a Republic…

The Life of Jesus (1795)
The Life of Jesus

Studies (1795–1796)
One Might Hold the Most Contradictory Reflections…
A Positive Faith…
Every People…

Report of an Alpine Journey – Eleusis (to Hölderlin) (1796)
Report of an Alpine Journey
Eleusis

Not More Precisely Datable
On Lessing’s Correspondence with His Wife
People, Early On…
The Dispute Over…

Reports on Lost Works
De utilitate poescos
Baccalaureate Speech
Magister Specimens
Sermon for the Consistorial Examination
Schemes for a Gospel Harmony
Analysis of Schiller’s Fiesco
Translations
Preparations on Classical Authors
School and College Notebooks

Appendix
Principles of the Edition of the Collected Works
Fonts, Symbols, Abbreviations, Sigla
Editorial Report
General Notes
On the Dating of the Texts
On the Individual Texts
Annotations
Index of Persons

Diary

(1785–1787)

Sunday, June 26

In the morning service, Reverend Rieger, the court preacher, gave the sermon. He first read the Augsburg Confession, beginning with its preface, and then the sermon followed. Even if I had remembered nothing else, my knowledge of history would nonetheless have been increased. I learned that on June 25, 1530, the Augsburg Confession was presented; that on February 2, 1535, Württemberg was reformed; and that in 1599 the Prague Treaty confirmed the Evangelical religion. They received the name “Protestants” from their protest against the harsh Imperial Resolution at the Diet of Speyer in 1529. I also recall that Luther died on February 18, 1546, and that the Elector of Saxony, John the Steadfast, was utterly defeated and captured on April 24, 1547.

Monday, June 27

No world history has pleased me more than Schröckh’s. He avoids the tedium of countless names found in specialized histories, yet narrates all major events, wisely omitting the multitude of kings, minor wars (where often only a few hundred men scuffled), and the like. Most importantly, he connects instructive material with the narrative. He also carefully documents the state of scholarship and learning throughout.

Today was a conventus (a monthly meeting of the professors in the Gymnasium, where they deliberate on matters concerning the 6th and 7th classes and discipline violators of school rules). We Primi, as the representatives of the graduating class (as the Rector called us), had to appear. From the 7th class were: Cammerer, Primus Veterum (son of the court physician); Duttenhofer; Vischer, Primus Novitiorum (son of the revenue office secretary). From the 6th class: Boger, Primus Veterum (son of a lieutenant colonel); Hegel, Primus Novitiorum.

Nothing more was presented to us than a serious exhortation to warn our fellow students not to join immoral and disreputable societies. A group of young men aged 16–17, and girls aged 11–12, calling themselves the Doggen-Gesellschaft, or Lapplanders, has appeared. The boys promenade the girls and corrupt both themselves and their time disgracefully. Among the Gymnasium students involved are, from the 7th class: Vischer, Neuffer; from the 6th: Stäudlin. Among the university students: Vischer, Haselmayer, Georgii.

Tuesday, June 28

I noticed how differently people react to the same event. News was shared of a woman having given birth successfully. M. V., a former husband, was deeply pleased; J. B., a grown woman familiar with such events, even more so, saying that no greater joy exists than a successful childbirth. But just then, a fine horse was ridden past us. B., about 21 years old, asked immediately who owned it, paying little attention to the joyous news. I, too, rushed over, not particularly moved by the birth, and agreed that it was indeed a beautiful horse.

While I ate cherries with great appetite, thoroughly refreshed and content, someone else—older than I—watched indifferently and said that in youth one feels irresistibly drawn to a cherry vendor (as we Swabians say, one’s mouth waters at the sight), but in older years, one can let a whole spring pass by without such cravings. This reminded me of a rather dreary (but wise) maxim: in youth, driven by uncontainable desire, one cannot eat much without harming one’s health; in old age, one may not.

Wednesday, June 29

Oh dear! Bad news from Hohenheim. The peasants—those cursed people—smashed all the windows of the duke’s palace at Scharnhausen.

Today was a holiday. I didn’t attend church, but went walking in the Bopser forest with Duttenhofer and Autenrieth.

Thursday, June 30

It was oppressively hot today and looked like a storm was coming, but it passed. I played chess again—my beloved game—and though I’m not a good player, I won both times. I never play according to a plan, as one should; I simply start randomly (which is a great mistake), and let the game unfold. The position of the pieces determines my plan. In future, I shall try to devise a plan from the very beginning and follow it through the entire game. I note this here just so the last day of the month does not remain empty.

Friday, July 1

I have long wondered what a “pragmatic history” is. Today (though I don’t recall who explained it), I received a somewhat vague and one-sided definition. I believe a pragmatic history is one that not only recounts facts but also elaborates on the character of a great person, a whole nation, its customs, religion, and how these evolve and differ from other peoples; it traces the decline and rise of empires, and shows how a particular event or political change affected the nation’s constitution, character, and so on.

Saturday, July 2

Why did Socrates offer a rooster to Aesculapius before his death? Professor Offterdinger posed this question in our weekly colloquium. According to various interpretations, he believed that Socrates was already unconscious due to the effects of the poison. I, however, believe that Socrates, knowing the customary practice, did not want to offend the masses by neglecting this small offering.

Sunday, July 3

On the way back from a walk, we—especially I (for vanity must always be involved)—proposed this maxim: every good has its bad side (sometimes less, sometimes more, depending on the good). We applied this saying at every step. R., who had taken a different path, was approaching. As we waited for him, one of us questioned what possible good could come from standing in the way. We answered: had we run off, someone might have tripped—or had an unkind thought. Very Stoic indeed!

Monday, July 4

During a walk, Professor Cleß questioned me on various topics, especially on the earth’s tilt, which causes the seasons. I asked why it is often hotter in July and August than in June, when the sun is closest to us. It is known that heat arises from the sun’s rays reflecting in our atmosphere. Professor Cleß offered the following explanation: in June, the sun’s direct contact excites the fiery particles near the earth’s surface. These then ignite neighboring particles in a chain reaction that reaches deep into the earth. By July and August, most of these are activated, and thus the greatest heat is released back into the atmosphere. That is why it is hottest then.

Tuesday, July 5

I purchased the following books from the library of the late Preceptor Löffler, my most esteemed teacher and guide:

Greek
– Aristotle, De moribus
– Demosthenes, Oration on the Crown
– Isocrates, Speeches XXI and Letters, Complete Works

Latin (Prose)
– Cicero, Philosophical Works
– Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights
– Velleius Paterculus
– Diodorus Siculus

Latin (Poetry)
– Plautus
– Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, Gallus, Claudian, and Ausonius
– Hieronymus Vida
– Christian Virgil
– Sannazaro

Wednesday, July 6

Preceptor Löffler was one of my most highly esteemed teachers, especially in the lower Gymnasium; I may safely call him perhaps the very best. I entered his instruction in the autumn of 1777, when he was Praeceptor I inf. Cl. Thus I was with him for the first half of 1778. That same year, the late Preceptor Schiffner died, and in the fall Löffler advanced with us by one class level. So I received his instruction for the whole of 1778 and most of 1779. Even after I left his class for that of my uncle, Preceptor Goriz, I continued private lessons with him throughout that year—and again in 1783, when I was a novice in the first class under Professor Nast. In the first period of private instruction, Lebret and Autenrieth studied with me; in the second, I was alone. In the first course, we translated Curtius, Aesop, and the New Testament, namely on Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from 11 to 12 and from 2 to 3. In the second course, I translated Cicero’s De Senectute, Somnium Scipionis, and Laelius de Amicitia; in Greek, the New Testament letters to the Thessalonians and to the Romans, and some Hebrew Psalms. We finished with Vida’s Christiad, of which I knew many passages by heart.

Thursday, July 7

He was the most upright and impartial man. His greatest concern was to be of benefit to his students, to himself, and to the world. He did not think, as others do, that once one has their bread secured, one need not study further and may go on perpetuating the eternal, annually recycled classroom routine. No, the late man thought otherwise. He understood the value of learning, and the comfort it offers in life’s many circumstances. How often, and how cheerfully and contentedly, did he sit with me in that beloved little room—and I with him. Few understood his merits. A great misfortune for him was that he had to work so far beneath his proper sphere. And now he too has passed! But I will carry his memory, unwavering, in my heart forever.

Let me add this: he gave me, already in 1778, eighteen volumes of Shakespeare’s plays as a gift.

Friday, July 8

As a general trait, I have found in the character of the female sex (though surely some men are not exempt from it) a complete contradiction of Horace’s lines:

Sperat infestis, metuit secundis
Alteram sortem bene praeparatum
Pectus.

“The well-prepared heart hopes in adversity and fears in prosperity.”

Saturday, July 9

If superstition has ever concocted anything dreadful—an adventure so absurd and devoid of reason—it is surely the so-called “Muthes Heer” (The Brave Host). Last Sunday night at 1 or 2 a.m., many people claimed to have seen it—even (shameful to say) individuals from whom one would expect more enlightenment, some even holding public office. One old woman said she had seen a fiery wagon with people in it; others claimed to have seen different things. Commonly it is said that it is the devil in a fiery chariot, from the front of which flies an angel of God, calling out to all: “Out of the way, the brave host is coming!” Whoever does not heed this divine warning is dragged by the devil into his domain.

Sunday, July 10

Returning to the tale of the “Brave Host” from last Sunday: people tell it with the same details, and I have been told the names of several who saw or heard it (an atrocious clamor, supposedly). A few days later, it became clear that—oh shame! shame!—they were carriages. Mr. von Türkheim had held a very well-attended concert that lasted until 2 a.m. To prevent the guests from groping home in the dark, he had them driven back in carriages with torches. And that was the Brave Host. Ha! Ha! Ha! O tempora! o mores! Happened in 1785. O! O!

Monday, July 11

This incident produced the following anecdote. Townspeople came to the main guard post, reported the event, and asked the commanding officer to be watchful in case the Brave Host should return. The lieutenant ordered the guard to be vigilant. A soldier, perhaps unaware of the tale, asked, “If it comes, does Your Grace the Lieutenant order me to arrest it?” “Yes, yes,” the lieutenant said. “Just arrest it.” But it never returned.

Tuesday, July 12

A similar event happened recently. Four ladies were returning late at night from Chaussée House on the Ludwigsburg road (which passes the gallows) around midnight. At Chausséehäuslein, a headless rider approached them on horseback, riding now beside, now ahead, now behind their carriage. The coachman tried to avoid him, but the rider followed until he vanished at the city gate. This was attested by five or six witnesses.

Only several days later did an officer explain that he had been at that very place and time, joined the carriage, and rode along. But unwilling to enter through that particular gate, he took another route. He added that he could not understand why the coachman had kept trying to avoid him.

Wednesday, July 13

Today I visited the Ducal Library for the first time. Every Wednesday and Saturday from 2 to 5, anyone may attend. It is a large room with a long table, writing implements, and paper where one can sit. You write the book you want next to your name on a slip of paper and give it to the attendant, who fetches the book. Since other books were unavailable, I requested Batteux’s Introduction to the Fine Arts and read the section on epic poetry.

Thursday, July 14

Professors Abel and Hopf honored our circle with a visit the day before yesterday. We went for a walk with them, during which they entertained us, especially with stories of Vienna.

Friday, July 15

I walked with Professor Cleß. We read in Mendelssohn’s Phädon, particularly the introductory part describing Socrates’s character. Anytus, Meletus, and Crito were the three scoundrels who procured his death through a fearful senate and a rabid mob.

Saturday, July 16

Today, the city clerk Klüpfel died, just as he was thought to be recovering. He leaves behind nine children, one of whom had been appointed to his position just eight days prior; another entered the monastery last autumn.

Tuesday, July 19

Likewise today, Privy Councilor and Cabinet Secretary Schmidlin died of a stroke just as he reached for his spoon at lunch. Leypold, a good friend of mine, is one of his grandsons.

Wednesday, July 20

I returned to the library today and asked for Dusch’s Letters on the Formation of Taste, but they were either unavailable or could not be found, so I did not receive them and read again in Ramler instead. I also played chess twice with Mr. Riederer and won both games.

Thursday, July 21

I went for a walk with Professor Cleß. As we crossed the moat, the great bell rang to mark the funeral of Privy Councilor Schmidlin. At the same time, trumpets began to sound mourning notes from the city tower (moles propinqua nubibus arduis). The deep, solemn tone of the bell and the mournful sound of the trumpets made such a sublime impression upon me that I cannot describe it. From a distance I occasionally saw the carriages and thought of the lamentations of those left behind.

Friday, July 22

I went walking again with Professor Cleß; he examined me on solid bodies.
Bodies whose origin can be explained are divided into regular and irregular.

1) Irregular bodies:
Prisms are bodies enclosed by as many parallelograms as the sides of their parallel base surfaces.
Pyramids are bodies enclosed by as many triangles as the sides of their base.

2) Regular bodies:
There can be only five. To prove this, one must first establish that a solid angle cannot consist of four right angles (4 × 90° = 360°), because then it would be flat and not an angle at all.

Saturday, July 23

Therefore, a solid angle must be less than four right angles. Now to the regular bodies: these are solids bounded by equal and similar figures, enclosing equal solid angles. The simplest figure here is the equilateral triangle. So, to begin with the bodies composed of triangles:

a) Four triangles are needed to bound a solid. Is this possible—does the solid angle stay under 360°? Yes. Each triangle has angles of 60°, so three such angles make 180°, which is less than 360°.

b) What if the solid angle is formed by four triangles? Then it equals 240°—still acceptable.

c) What about five? Then the solid angle equals 5 × 60° = 300°—also acceptable.

d) And with six? The angle is 6 × 60° = 360°—no longer valid. So this case is ruled out.

Sunday, July 24

The next figure is the square or rhombus. To form a solid angle, three squares are needed. These together make an angle of 3 × 90° = 270°—acceptable. But with four squares, the angle would be 360°, so that is not possible.

Next come polygons. First, the regular pentagon. To find the internal angle of a polygon, divide 360° by the number of sides and subtract that from 180°:
360 ÷ 5 = 72; 180 − 72 = 108°.
So a single internal angle of a pentagon is 108°, and a solid angle composed of three pentagons would be 3 × 108° = 324°—acceptable.
Four pentagons? 4 × 108° = 432°—too large.

What about hexagons?
360 ÷ 6 = 60; 180 − 60 = 120°.
So 3 × 120° = 360°—again, invalid. It follows that hexagons cannot form a regular solid angle.

Monday, July 25

Thus, there are only five regular geometric solids:

Composed of triangles:
a) Tetrahedron — solid angle = 180°, 4 triangles
b) Octahedron — angle = 240°, 8 triangles
c) Icosahedron — angle = 300°, 20 triangles
Composed of squares:
Cube (or hexahedron) — angle = 270°, 6 squares
Composed of pentagons:
Dodecahedron — angle = 324°, 12 pentagons

Friday, July 29

For the exercise of style and the strengthening of resolve, it seems worthwhile to compose a brief historical sketch in Latin. I have therefore resolved to recount Roman affairs in summary, to taste at least with the lips the beginnings of them.

The city was founded by Romulus, first of the Roman kings. From the beginning, they had kings; but when the last of them became arrogant and infringed upon the people’s rights, the citizens preferred another form of government.
They expelled the king and appointed consuls—two each year—who jointly held supreme power. Though this power was often interrupted by popular agitation, it held firm for a long time.

Eventually, ambition and growing wealth led the aristocracy to corrupt the people, annul laws through bribery, and claim tyranny. What had begun with promise was obscured by the cruelty of the Caesars who followed and by the indifference of all citizens. The Roman state withered day by day, and with increasing discord and injustice, it tottered so greatly that even without barbarian invasions, it would have collapsed.

Finding their native lands too small, foreigners sought new settlements. Perceiving Rome’s weakness, they shook Italy and pillaged it with impunity, while the Romans—horrifying to relate—offered tribute and begged the barbarians for peace.

Saturday, July 30

I often find myself marveling at the astonishing fortunes of things. Cicero’s Offices and Dialogues are now widely circulated, printed in the year 1582. When not even two years had passed since I acquired them, I found myself deeply impressed by the age the book had already endured. I reflected that two full centuries had elapsed since that volume was first printed. Reflecting further on the many hands that must have diligently labored in its printing and on the men whose judgment guided those hands—now all buried in the oblivion of posterity—I scarcely knew what to think. Those men, were they still alive, would surely grieve to know that, after death, their memory, their virtues, and their good deeds would vanish from human minds. Yet I am now convinced that these men would think quite differently about this matter.

Sunday, July 31

Lacking other material, I will briefly recount the misfortunes of Adrastus. Adrastus, the son of the king of Phrygia, after killing his brother, fled and, having been expelled by his father, came to Croesus, king of Lydia. Croesus received him kindly, and having learned the cause of his exile, purified Adrastus according to the ancient rites of the Lydians. Croesus had two sons: one disfigured in the face and thus despised, the other physically handsome and full of life, greatly beloved by his father.

At that time, Croesus dreamt that his more beloved son, named Atys, was pierced by a spear of iron. Terrified by this dream, and with wild boars devastating Mysian lands, Croesus selected young Lydians and dogs for a hunting expedition, but refused to send Atys, despite his proven bravery. Instead, he arranged his son’s wedding, ostensibly to hinder his participation in the hunt. Atys, having learned of this plan, approached his father and asked for an explanation. The king recounted his dream and tried to dissuade him from going. But the youth replied that it was not spears, nor the hands that wield them, which could harm him—and that he would return unharmed.

Croesus, persuaded by this interpretation of the dream, let him go—but not without secretly instructing Adrastus to take care of the boy’s life.

Monday, August 1

Having departed, they arrived in the region where the boar lived, tracked it down, and encircled it. Adrastus, aiming his spear at the boar, missed his mark and accidentally struck Atys, son of Croesus. One could have seen Adrastus overwhelmed by this fresh disaster, lamenting and cursing himself. Meanwhile Croesus, having learned of the death of his only surviving son, was overcome with grief—but still forgave Adrastus. Adrastus, judging himself the most miserable of all mortals, ended his own life upon Atys’s tomb, bringing to a close a life torn by continual misfortunes.

Tuesday, August 2

Often reflecting on the difficulty of the Greek language, I have arrived at the following causes. The Greeks, easily the most learned, cultured, and valorous of their contemporaries, hardly ever bothered to learn the languages of the barbarians, whom they despised as crude. They had little interaction with those subjugated peoples. The victors either eradicated their languages or confined them to the lower classes, letting their own tongue predominate. Thus, amid the crudeness of barbarian speech, the Greeks developed and enriched their own language further. From this arose the great richness of Greek literature, which now poses many difficulties for foreigners.

Wednesday, August 3

Another significant factor was the unbounded political liberty allowed by the constitutions of the Greek cities. Because the greatest powers often lay with the people, anyone who wished to succeed had to gain popular favor in order to implement his plans. It did not take long for the more astute to realize that the people could be swayed by the charm of eloquence. Hence, they devoted themselves zealously to cultivating their language toward elegance and grace.

Thursday, August 4

In addition, the Greeks employed a vast number of elegant and ornamental particles. Their numerical system, too, we can no longer emulate in our day, as it has been wholly corrupted by the misuse of inferior accents.

Friday, August 5

(Entry missing.)

Sunday, August 7

Today, for the first time, I attended the Catholic liturgy and sacred sermon, composed and delivered by Werkmeister. The Mass, as they call it, was not yet over when I arrived—and I must say, it displeased me greatly, as it would any reasonable man. After the hymn was chanted, the sermon followed, which pleased me so much that I resolved to attend such sermons more frequently. The whole message aimed to lead those who stubbornly clung to a harsh and outdated rigidity toward a milder disposition, even if the other Christians in question held differing doctrines. Not a single word was spoken that revealed the mournful disunity of Christians.

Monday, August 8

It would be wrong to omit in this account of my activities that today, under the blessing of God, we began reading Livy’s Histories in the class of the Reverend Professor Cless. The Reverend Professor began by briefly sketching the life of Livy, of which little is known. What I did learn, I will briefly record.

Tuesday, August 9

Livy, a native of Padua, flourished under the reign of Augustus. Though he was expected to flatter the emperor according to the customs of the time, he so despised all forms of sycophancy that he could not help but mention it in the preface to his work.

The excellence of his histories is proven by this example: A citizen of Gades (modern Cádiz), having heard of Livy’s fame even in those distant lands, journeyed to Italy. Upon arriving in Rome, he paid no attention to the city’s many wonders of art and architecture, but came only to see Livy himself. After laying eyes on the man, he immediately departed the city so that nothing might defile the gaze with which he had beheld Livy.

Sunday, August 21

Today I again attended Catholic services. Majer interpreted the Catechism, and this exposition, both in the venerable interpreter’s erudition and in its great clarity, pleased me immensely. Earlier in the day, a newly appointed and summoned minister of the divine word delivered a public sermon on the topic of virtue—one which I deeply regretted not having attended.

Monday, August 22

I have often reflected to myself—and have also found it confirmed in books worthy of examination—which is the most powerful disturbance of the soul, the one that has brought the greatest calamities upon both individuals and nations, upon cities, lands, states, and kingdoms. Let us then consider what effects have been wrought by the lust for honor, the love of gold, pride, envy, despair, hatred, anger, and the desire for revenge.

Tuesday, August 23

Without doubt, the lust for honor—especially when combined with the desire for power—has caused the greatest public disasters. What drove Alexander the Great to wage a ruinous war against Darius, who had never wronged him? What compelled Timur, the king of Persia, who had already conquered vast parts of Asia with victorious armies and gained immense glory?

What drove so many of Rome’s greatest generals, whose names would be too many to list? Did not this same drive also provoke the deadly duels among students—those so-called duella—that destroyed the lives of many promising young men, who were the sole consolation and joy of their parents?

Wednesday, August 24

Among barbarian and uncultivated peoples, there is no motive for virtue other than honor and the love of one’s homeland, parents, wives, and children. The same can be said of our ancestors: they devastated vast fields and lands and sent countless men to the underworld in order to make a name for themselves—not only in their own region, but throughout all of Germany. Thus far concerning the lust for honor—let us now return to other matters.

Thursday, August 25

On the fourth day before the Ides of December 1785.
I have resolved to resume this diary—interrupted for a long period by our examination on the day before and the day of the Nones of September, and most of all by the severe and protracted illness that overcame me—and to renew my former studies by practicing my writing. Therefore, I will now briefly recount the events of that time.

Several days before the examination, though already weakened in health, I did not refrain from attending the exam, held as stated on the day before and on the Nones of September, even though both my teachers and others had advised against it. Once it was completed, I no longer set foot beyond the threshold of our house. I was struck by a severe illness, but thanks to the diligence of the physician and timely administration of medicine, I recovered somewhat.

However, my neck became greatly swollen on the left side, as the entire pestilence and corruption of the illness gathered there. Long tormented by this swelling, I was finally given relief through the skill of the surgeon Mohrstadt and the physician Conspruch. The former opened the tumor with an incision as wide as a thumb, allowing a terrible quantity of pus and blood to drain over three days. Thanks to the surgeon’s care and frequent bandaging, the wound healed in about thirty days. From the time of the incision on the sixth day before the Nones of October, I returned to the Gymnasium on the day before the Kalends of November.

Friday, December 10, 1785

During these events, many other things worth remembering happened beyond my own affairs. My dear friend and fellow theological student—whom I believe was J. F. Duttenhofer—was taken from us and departed to Tübingen. Around the same time, the celebrated Moser, the great glory of our homeland, died. He had written more books than a human lifespan could read, and had endured a life tossed about by many and varied hardships. Also dead is Hochsteter, a man distinguished by his honors and other qualities I need not detail here. Finally, that man of noble birth and wealth, von Herzberg, passed away.

Saturday, December 11, 1785

Meanwhile, I also added several books to my little library. I purchased:

Livy, with my own funds, for four florins.
Clavis Ciceroniana by Ernesti, for one thaler.
Cicero’s Letters to Atticus, for ten cruces.
Campe’s Theophron in the vernacular, for twenty-six cruces.
Home’s Art of Criticism, translated from English into German by Meinhard, from the library of the late Loeffler, for one florin and forty-five cruces, in two volumes.
The philosophical works of Seneca, for fifteen cruces.

December 12, 1785

Today a question arose among us: whether repetition or preparation is to be preferred. My judgment has always been that the best approach is to combine the two; but if one must be chosen, then I prefer repetition over preparation. For what is merely prepared is, so to speak, only half digested—we do not fully grasp its sense or absorb it entirely.

But when instructed by a teacher, we comprehend the whole, the just, the genuine meaning, which, through repetition, becomes almost permanently impressed upon the mind. What is falsely interpreted by our own reading and clarified by the teacher will not stick for long unless repeated—and will soon vanish.

Today, in the presence of noble guests from Stuttgart, a public concert of vocal, string, and brass music was held.

December 13, 1785

Today was held the formal review of the morals and studies of the sixth class, an event they call the percursus (Durchgang). Yesterday, the seventh class was examined.

December 14, 1785

Yesterday the annual winter fair began, during which items to be given as gifts to those born on the feast day commemorating the birth of Christ are sold. Especially yesterday, when the roads were teeming with people from the countryside, one could see drunken men staggering about the streets, many of whom had purchased shoes either for themselves or for a woman or for their children. One could witness countless scenes—quarrels here, goods being haggled over there, and much more.

We had holidays over these two days: the first half was spent on necessary business, the remainder in leisure, jokes, running about, and walks. It now falls to me to undertake the duty of offering good wishes to each of our professors on the Kalends of January—a task in which the ancient and especially medieval Latin poets provide splendid assistance.

December 15, 1785

During this winter semester, I have resolved—especially at the urging of the most venerable teacher and patron, Herr Hopf—to devote myself seriously to Latin, and in particular to practice writing in that language. But I waver, drawn this way and that—in fact, I am unsure which classical author I should choose. Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations came to mind. I planned to render them in German and provide commentary. But such is youthful inconsistency: already I am dissatisfied with the plan—if not due to the difficulty and obscurity of the Latin itself, then due to the philosophy and eloquence that, as Cicero himself says, are most essential here.

December 16, 1785

It was night, and with a calm mind I was reading a book when—(my mind shudders to recount it)—a fire alarm bell rang out across our city, terrifying us. Oh, what fear gripped everyone. As the blaze spread, my father and I ran to help at a nearby house.

There we saw a building completely engulfed in flames and nearly consumed by the fire. By the time we arrived, the blaze had already begun to subside, and shortly thereafter it faded almost completely, with smoke rising high into the sky. What more can I say? Within scarcely an hour, the fire was extinguished, though half the house had been destroyed. The neighboring houses were also badly damaged, both by the spreading fire and, wisely and properly, by the controlled demolitions meant to halt its advance.

December 17, 1785

The cause of the fire, as expected, was explained in a hundred different ways. Most say it had something to do with molten lead, though even in this they differ. Others say—well, what good is it to recount so many rumors? The general agreement seems to be that it was the foolish behavior of the daughter of the teacher, involving mischief and irresponsibility unworthy of her age and position. As she tried to save a bed, her hair, face, and clothing were badly burned.

December 18, 1785

No entry.

December 21, 1785

Today was the winter solstice and the feast day of St. Thomas. Now that we have endured the harshest time of the year, we may find solace in the fact that from this day forward, the days will continually grow longer and no longer decrease. A small concert of vocal and instrumental music was held at our house. Colonel von Rau, who resides in the upper floor of our house, attended. After he departed, Secretary Moser and his wife, Secretary Günzler and his wife, and Mr. Zorer, the brother of two wives, came to visit.

December 22, 1785

Long before I fell gravely ill, I had begun to reflect on both the good and bad that arise from emotional disturbances. I have already discussed the lust for honor. No one can deny that it has brought about many good things, especially when a person, moved by this passion, sought honor through good deeds. In such cases, the deeds themselves are upright, though the motives—when based on the pursuit of honor—are less pure. Truly good deeds, those carried out from virtue and not from the desire for personal gain, are the most worthy of praise.

December 23, 1785

Let us now consider the lust for gold and riches—whether it be sordid avarice or disgraceful greed in seeking money. If the former, the miser harms others less than himself. Such a man is most unfortunate, and it is even worse for those who must deal with him. With him, many other vices are joined: treachery toward friends, cruelty and hardness toward those in need, deceit toward family and servants. Worst of all is when such a man serves a prince—for then he may betray the very one to whom he has sworn loyalty.

December 25, 1785 (Christmas Day)

Today is the joyful feast day of our blessed Savior. As is customary, I received generous gifts from my father. Among them are many pleasing items, but the most delightful and useful is Scheller’s Lexicon, whose excellence I have already experienced in use.

January 1, 1786

A new year has dawned under the auspices of God. In these past days I also purchased Scheller’s Precepts of Good Latin Style, especially in the Ciceronian tradition—that is, of Roman eloquence.

February 11, 1786

Let us now return, after a long interruption, to these our ancient stylistic exercises, since today marks the 59th birthday of our Most Serene Lord Duke. By some mishap, I did not attend the sermon in which the ninth chapter of the Wisdom of Solomon was expounded. In the afternoon, I listened in the Gymnasium to a speech by Professor Schmidlin concerning our Duke’s merits in the field of literature and education in Württemberg. He first outlined his contributions to the excellence of the University of Tübingen, then to our Gymnasium, then to the monastic schools; this was followed by the Latin and so-called German “trivial schools.” After these, he described the splendid establishment of the Academy, at first military, later expanded into a literary institution. He concluded with the foundation for the education of the female sex, known as the “school (école).” The entire speech ended with ardent prayers and good wishes for the health of our Duke and his wife, who are currently abroad.

February 15, 1786

Since oratorical exercises are customarily undertaken in summer to promote eloquence, I wish to prepare myself now so that, should the time come to speak on a chosen subject, I may not be unprepared, nor compelled to waste time on invention. I shall begin in this journal by sketching out the initial lines.

The prologue should a) address the purpose of these stylistic exercises; b) draw the subject matter from something near to our studies and suitable to our age and habits, yet not entirely historical in nature, so as to leave room for our own invention. The theme shall follow—namely, conversation—along with its definition. First, I will discuss its necessity, which nature has implanted in us; then the benefits of conversation, when it is properly conducted; next, the harms that arise when it is excessive or improperly conducted. This is to be followed by the duties of those who engage in conversation with each other, and the entire speech is to conclude with an exhortation. The epilogue should include a) an apology by the youth; b) thanks for the institution—1) to its founder; 2) to those who supported it; c) a praise of eloquence; and finally, the closing.

February 16, 1786

Let me now proceed to the individual parts. In keeping with the custom of this institution, I ascend this platform to present to you what I have prepared under the guidance of you, our most worthy teacher and patron, and now submit to your judgment, dearest auditors and fellow students. The greatest and most important goal seems to me to be this: that we should train the mouth, the voice, and the entire body to exhibit either gravity, gentleness, vehemence, or modesty—and to now raise and now lower our manner of speaking accordingly. This, indeed, is true declamation: where the voice, face, and limbs all agree with the content of the speech. In choosing the subject—left, with great kindness, to our discretion by you, most venerable man—I have tried first and foremost to select a topic fitting for me to treat.

February 18, 1786

I chose a subject drawn from the realm of our academic life, not too distant from our knowledge and character. Furthermore, it should not be entirely based on history, leaving nothing to our invention except the framework and structure. I therefore judged it suitable to speak about conversation, which consists of meeting often, speaking together, walking, and spending time together in such a way that a kind of shared purpose is formed—especially consultation about affairs and carrying them out together. But can it still be called conversation when people meet only for reasons of official business and perform their duties regularly? Perhaps it can. That nature implanted the need for conversation in us, few would doubt. Though solitude is praised by many, even the wisest, and is dearly loved by contemplative men who have much to draw from within themselves, still you will find few who always remain withdrawn. When wearied by mental labor, people naturally seek out the company of others—of upright and like-minded individuals.

I do not mean by these words to argue that solitude should be shunned or that human gatherings should always be sought. Solitude has its own time, manner, and purpose—and so does social interaction. (See Zimmermann, Berol. Bibl.) Let me now add something about the benefits of conversation.

First, let us speak about its advantages with older people, which are many and diverse. To name them all would detain you too long.

February 21, 1786

First and foremost, conversation with elders brings the benefit of acquiring knowledge about many things. This includes especially a type of knowledge indispensable to anyone laboring with any real benefit for others or even simply wishing to live rightly in the world: knowledge of people. Let us add that, particularly in our time and customs, it is impossible to do without certain forms of etiquette and outward manners. These are best learned by prolonged association with cultivated, polished people—with those who, as we say, are worn smooth by long contact with the world. A person who appears dull outwardly is readily assumed to be just as dull inwardly—and rarely is this assumption mistaken.

So if so many benefits arise from just and proper social intercourse, it must follow that improper or excessive interaction brings forth many evils. These include a) dissipation and distraction of the mind; b) loss of time; c) alienation and aversion from all that demands a more serious spirit—and from solitude, which such pursuits require.

Let us now consider the duties of those who engage in conversation. Those in positions of superiority should not lower themselves too much or involve themselves in trivial matters. A certain sacred reverence should deter the young man from wrongdoing—especially if he is good and reveres his mentor—for fear that by committing some misdeed he might forfeit his patron’s favor.

Now I come to conversation with the fairer sex. This is the reef upon which many noble spirits have shipwrecked. What then should be done? Should all contact be entirely avoided? But as I said, we are born under a law that requires social interaction. Are women not human? Who would deny it? So we must interact with them. But the question is: what misfortunes can result? Does it offer no benefits? Far from it. Indeed, if approached rightly, it can offer great advantages.

Anyone who, as each of you undoubtedly wishes, desires to be successful in our society, must learn to shed his dross, and nowhere is this more effectively done than in the company of women. For they hold the monopoly on both praise and shame. Since we must engage with all people, we should diligently strive to gain the skill of drawing benefit from each person. To the prudent man, nothing is so barren that he cannot extract some advantage from it.

Yet I fear that by extending my discourse further, I would weary my benevolent audience. Let us hasten, then, to the conclusion. But to you, most excellent and noble sir, I offer—as far as youthful eloquence allows—before deeds permit, at least in words, my sincerest thanks—(breaks off).

March 6, 1786 – On the Practice of Excerpting
(Pridie Nonas Martias Anno Christi Nativitatis 1786)

The practice known as Exzipiren—that is, the rendering of a theme or passage from one language into another, especially from Latin into German or vice versa—has been hotly debated. Some, particularly among teachers and academic authorities, defend and uphold it; others, at least as numerous, reject and banish it from instruction altogether. I wish here to examine, so far as my insight permits, the chief arguments offered in its defense.

A.) One often hears it said that Exzipiren promotes a more fluent and effortless writing style. Young students, so the argument goes, when translating, are prone to extravagance and bombast; the restraint imposed by excerpting would thus protect them from such inflation. While this seems plausible to some, one must ask whether the resulting “fluent” Latin is true Latin. By fluent Latin, I mean that which flows in accordance with the natural rhythm and period of the language—elegant, yet not artificial or inflated. But can students truly follow all the principles of numerosity, simplicity, and periodicity in prose, while excerpting?

Let us not forget the deep structural disparity between languages, especially between German and Latin, which inevitably hinders proper transposition in excerpting. What we often find are German constructions and syntax awkwardly inserted into Latin. The sequence of ideas remains largely unchanged, leading to a pseudo-Latin result that mimics German phrasing, rather than authentic Roman idiom.

Where, then, lies the root cause of students developing a taste for bombastic Latin?

Among many contributing factors, one appears as the primary culprit: the method by which the ancient authors are read. The classics are approached primarily as a repository of linguistic material—words and phrases to be extracted, catalogued, and deployed—without any regard for the spirit, tone, or content of the works themselves. Their ideas, arguments, and literary character are neglected in favor of a utilitarian fixation on expression.

Students jot down phrases indiscriminately—whether from an orator, historian, or philosopher, whether plain, ornate, or obscure—and then mix them all together. A rhetorical phrase originally designed to heighten a contrast or serve an argumentative function is later misapplied to some trivial narrative. For example, in Livy (IV.2), when Canuleius describes the unjust treatment of the plebeians by the patricians, he says: cives nos eorum esse, et si non easdem opes habere, eandem patriam incolere—a powerful rhetorical expansion of the idea of “fellow citizens.” Similarly, the expression lucis vobis hujus partem, si liceat, adimant, meant as a vigorous accusation, is misused in other contexts. The student is praised for including such phrases in his compositions, and the more elaborate they are, the better he is deemed. Thus arises bombast: phrases become disconnected from their rhetorical origin and appropriateness. Natural and genuine Latin is thereby lost.

B.) A second argument claims that Exzipiren helps students become more fluent in recalling vocabulary and phrases. But this raises a critical question: Does speed aid or hinder thoughtfulness and proper word choice?

Familiar words may require little deliberation. But unfamiliar ones surely do. If the student has not yet mastered a phrase or term and the dictation continues nonetheless, he is forced to rush. He hesitates, grows anxious, leaves gaps, or inserts hastily chosen words. In such a state, he cannot reflect; he simply reacts. If in a difficult text he fills all the blanks, the resulting excerpt is either well done or poorly done. If well done, it is not Exzipiren that deserves credit, but slow, careful reading and repeated exposure to the source material. If mediocre or poor, what value lies in such unproductive “writing zeal”?

There are indeed students who always have something to say, regardless of whether it is shallow, incorrect, or thoughtless. They can produce wordy answers to any question, but it is mere verbiage. I much prefer those who, though slower to respond, answer with more thought and intelligence. In the same spirit, I value a slight slowness in composition far more than the rushed output that Exzipiren encourages. It is through deliberate practice that one’s style matures, and genuine fluency eventually arises—of the sort that no “fast” excerptor, who never trained himself in slow composition, will ever attain. True mastery is to write both quickly and well.

C.) It is further claimed that one can assess a student’s strength in a language by his excerpting. But what kind of strength is meant here? Let us consider what critical strength entails.

Gesner defines criticism as the capacity to judge acquired through long familiarity with the ancients—not just understanding words, but discerning whether an entire book, treatise, formula, or even single word genuinely originates from the author to whom it is attributed. Such skill bears little resemblance to Exzipiren, and certainly cannot be measured by it. A good critic always chooses precise words and expressions. But one who assigns or grades excerpts is usually himself not a critic, and may well prefer a florid, phrase-laden rendition over a correct but unadorned one.

This objection, though, touches only adult scholars, not schoolboys or youth; and we certainly cannot expect to assess mature critics by their ability to excerpt. The same applies to those who have acquired linguistic strength through philosophical study or through learning a language for its practical value—say, to gain knowledge of particular disciplines.

Yet there remains one form of linguistic “strength” to which Exzipiren may relate: namely, whether a student has amassed a vocabulary sufficient to dress German thoughts in Latin garb. But let us be honest: such Latin is a far cry from Roman. Yes, one might recognize in a student’s excerpting a familiarity with words—but not their genuine Roman use. That understanding is better attained by reading original texts, not by excerpting them. Translation from Latin into German (or vice versa) is a more effective way to reach that goal.

In sum, everything I have said about Exzipiren applies equally to all its variations, whether from Latin into German or otherwise. It may be somewhat more tolerable in certain cases—where composition still serves a purpose, or where the language is still used in scholarly communication—but even then, its usefulness remains limited.

March 11, 1786 – On the Supposed Superstitions of Antiquity and Their Persistence in Christian Practices

Frequently, when reflecting upon the intellectual climate of our age, I find myself struck by the ease with which we ridicule the supposed errors of the ancients, especially the so-called “pagans” and their deeply rooted customs, beliefs, and mythological conceptions. These thoughts having once again visited my mind, I commit them briefly to writing.

In the course of religious instruction, I have heard the ancient belief in dual spiritual forces—a good and an evil genius presiding over each individual—treated with mockery. According to this view, these forces constantly battle; when the good genius triumphs, virtuous thoughts and deeds ensue; when the evil prevails, the individual is overwhelmed by wicked thoughts and driven to immoral acts. Reflecting upon whether our own age has truly abandoned this notion, I find that many, from commoners to the educated elite, still ascribe good actions and thoughts to divine influence and evil ones to the Devil. What difference remains between ancient and modern superstition?

Even though Christianity posits a single Devil as the enemy of all humankind, and ancient beliefs conceived of two spirits, the similarity is heightened by the persistent idea that virtuous persons are accompanied by one or more guardian angels, whereas those who fall into sin are abandoned by them. If a common man breaks the law, he may partially excuse himself by claiming that God had withdrawn from him and allowed the fall to happen. But this explanation offends against the very nature of divine providence, which—though it does not force virtue—likewise does not abandon its creatures arbitrarily. God did not create humanity to be like beasts, driven purely by instinct, nor like angels, who are bound to perfect goodness. Rather, man was placed in a middle state, endowed with free will, with the power to choose good or evil by his own reasoned deliberation.

A similar folly, often scorned in pagans, may be found among Christians. The ancients believed they could appease divine wrath through fasting and by offering food and drink to their gods. We may laugh at this now, but what truly has changed? Even today, among both enlightened Protestants and especially among Catholics, there remain rituals that mirror these ancient practices. The pagans believed that their offerings were consumed by the gods when devoured by the priests. Today, the practice persists, but without the explicit premise. Instead, superstitious believers give money and provisions to priests to win divine favor. What greater or more appalling folly can be imagined?

Perhaps the pagans, save a few more enlightened minds among them, simply projected their own human needs and affections onto their gods. But what is to be said of our contemporaries, who persist in offering gifts to well-fed, opulent, and often unworthy clergy, under the belief that in doing so they reconcile themselves with God? The same superstition endures, albeit in a different form, yet just as irrationally believed.

March 18, 1786 – On the Virtue of Impassivity in the Face of Offense

Today I read in a worthy little volume that he who has learned never to grow angry, even when wronged, has advanced far in the school of experience. O what a precept! More precious than gold, more splendid than silver, more enduring than jewels, and higher than all comparison. But one might object that even the calmest spirit may be justly provoked by great wrongs. True, I do not deny that it is virtuous to be stirred by grave injustice. Yet it is not necessary to be overtaken by rage—sorrow and moral outrage suffice. He who burns with anger at wickedness will also, it is to be feared, burn with anger in matters of wounded pride, ambition, or self-interest. Only he who has truly learned to master himself may rightly be permitted to burn with righteous indignation.

March 22, 1786 – On Happiness and the Enlightenment

All human beings strive for happiness. Only a few noble souls—who willingly sacrifice themselves to secure the happiness of others—stand as rare exceptions. Yet even they, I believe, do not sacrifice true happiness, but only temporal goods: worldly advantages, pleasures, even life itself. Therefore, they are not excluded from the pursuit of beatitude.

Before continuing, I must clarify what I mean by happiness (Glückseligkeit). But first I must explain what I mean by Enlightenment (Aufklärung), since the concept I aim to examine depends upon it. I mean here enlightenment through science and art, and thus restrict the discussion to the learned class. To propose a scheme for enlightening the common man seems to me both exceedingly difficult for most scholars, and for myself in particular—since I have not yet studied history in a philosophically thorough manner. I would suggest that the common man’s “enlightenment” has always been shaped by the dominant religion of his time, and in practice consists chiefly in advancements in trades, crafts, and general comfort.

Therefore, I shall speak only of the sciences and arts. In this respect, it appears to me that they first flourished in the East and South, gradually migrating Westward. Even though the reputed wisdom of the Egyptians has, at least philosophically, been somewhat diminished in modern estimation, there remains no doubt that their technical and artistic achievements reached such a degree of perfection that the ruins of their works are still admired today. It is highly probable that these practical accomplishments were also accompanied by a refined theoretical understanding.

Thus, the path of enlightenment, as I see it, is not merely historical or national, but philosophical: a movement from ignorance to understanding, from chaos to order, from servitude to freedom—though not, as some think, in material comfort alone, but rather in the cultivation of judgment, taste, and virtue.

January 1, 1787 – Reflections at the Beginning of the Year and on a Concert in the Ducal Academy

At present, I am in my first year in the seventh class of the local Gymnasium. My principal focus remains, as before, the study of languages—chiefly Ancient Greek and Latin. Alongside these, I occasionally devote time to geometry and mathematics more generally. In addition to the public lectures, I attend a private course with Professor Hopf, in which we dedicate three hours weekly to Longinus, and two to Cicero’s De Officiis. The manner in which we approach these texts is too familiar to require comment. I also spend some time composing short essays and recording my reflections, as may be seen from the accompanying schedule of my weekly study hours.

On Sundays I usually devote myself to spherical trigonometry and, in part, to the company of good friends. The remaining free hours are spent reading and excerpting Heyne’s Excursuses to his edition of Virgil.

Monday, January 1, 1787

In the morning I began reviewing spherical trigonometry from Lorenz’s Mathematics, which I had previously copied out. However, I was soon interrupted by visitors who came, as is customary on New Year’s Day, to offer their good wishes. Later, I had to go out myself on similar errands.

In the afternoon, I had intended to read only a few pages of Sophie’s Journey, but I found myself so thoroughly captivated that I could not tear myself away until evening, when I went to the concert. It is a standing tradition that each year on New Year’s Day, delegates from the town of Esslingen present the Duke with 100 ducats, designated as “Schutzgeld” or tribute. In connection with this occasion, a concert is held in the academy.

Although the noise of the assembled crowd made it difficult to hear the music distinctly, the time passed most agreeably, as I met with several dear friends whom I had not seen for some time. The sight of beautiful young ladies also contributed not a little to the pleasures of the evening.

[Marginal Note: Study Schedule for the Winter Semester 1786–87]

Monday:
11–12: Longinus
4–5: Review of Physics
5–6: Collegium on De Officiis
6–7: De Officiis
After dinner: De Officiis

Tuesday:
11–12: Private essays
4–5: Longinus
5–6: Weekly review (Hebdomad.)
6–7: Longinus
After dinner: Longinus

Wednesday:
11–12: Private essays
2–4: De Officiis
4–5: Mathematics
5–6: Longinus
6–7: Longinus

Friday:
11–12: Translation of Virgil
2–4: Homer’s Iliad
4–5: Greek Chrestomathy
5–6: Collegium on De Officiis
6–7: De Officiis
After dinner: De Officiis

Tuesday, January 2, 1787

A day like most others. In the evening I excerpted passages from Heyne’s Excursuses.

January 3–7, 1787 – Observations, Mathematical Study, and Reflections on a Mistaken Geometrical Assumption

Wednesday, January 3, 1787

Tonight was to have brought a total lunar eclipse. Professor Hopf prepared several telescopes from the newly acquired apparatus in the Gymnasium for public observation. A few people came up to the observatory, but the entirely cloud-covered sky made even the slightest viewing impossible. Rector Illuminirt shared with us, among other things, an anecdote from his youth: how, as a Gymnasium student, he had once participated in nighttime “stellatum” (celestial) observations. But instead of seriously observing, they had merely wandered about aimlessly. When some city philistines tried to apprehend them, the students claimed they were “stellatum gegangen.” To which the soldiers replied: “At night, you should be in bed—and go stellatum by day!”

Thursday, January 4, 1787

From 1 to 2 p.m., I visited Haugen, the son of the court instrument-maker, where I saw a clock that played beautifully in the tone of a flûte traversière. Later in the day, from 4 to 5 and from 6 to 7, I excerpted passages from Heyne’s first excursus on Aeneid II. Otherwise, the day followed its usual routine.

Friday, January 5, 1787

From 9 to 10, I excerpted material from a volume of the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek relating to editions of Demosthenes. From 10 to 12, I visited Griesinger, son of the Consistorial Councillor. There I saw Doppelmayr’s Atlas Coelestis and the entire library of his father. I borrowed the second volume of Kistner’s Mathematics. In the afternoon, I read and excerpted further from a new volume of the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek. From 5 to 6 we had an extra Longinus session due to the upcoming holiday. After dinner, I read from Kistner’s Mathematics (vol. II).

Saturday, January 6, 1787

I spent the morning until half-past ten working on trigonometry. Then I visited Professor Hopf to seek clarification on a difficult passage in Kistner’s Mathematics (vol. II, 1765, p. 159). My misunderstanding had arisen from the false assumption that the poles of any circle on a sphere are always a quadrant away from all points on its circumference. From this it would follow, absurdly, that only great circles on a sphere could have poles. Professor Hopf himself had initially agreed with my statement, but only later did I realize the error—and thus resolved it myself.

In the afternoon, I visited Steinkopf, who is of great service to his grandfather, the antiquarian Betulius, now growing old, and carries out most of his many burdensome duties. In the evening, we played the geographic card game, which is almost the same as Tarock, except that it includes more variations and penalties, and lacks tarocks, the skiz, or the bagatt. After dinner, I resumed study of spherical trigonometry, which no longer seems as difficult as it once did, back when I had yet to begin it.

Sunday, January 7, 1787

In the morning I worked on trigonometry. After lunch, the clear skies lured me outside for a walk. I yielded to their charms and gave myself a healthy hour-long excursion. On the road I encountered countless pedestrians, riders, and carriages. In the evening, I visited Leypold in the Academy. All the remaining time that afternoon and after supper I devoted once again to trigonometry.

Works from the Gymnasium Years:
An Essay from the Tübingen Seminary

1785–1788

Conversation Between Three Persons
1785, May 30

Antonius: Have you thought about the plan I laid before you? Are you now resolved?

Octavius: I have considered it and weighed it thoroughly. Should the execution proceed as successfully as the plan is wisely and prudently arranged, then something magnificent would be accomplished.

Lepidus: I found it the same.

Octavius: But now? Let us also determine the details and track down the obstacles that will stand in our way.

Antonius: After long reflection, I have found no particular difficulties.

Octavius: But I have. I will lay them before you. Will the free Romans submit to our rule? Will Brutus, will Cassius, will the others who helped slay the noble Caesar remain quiet? Will Sextus Pompeius be easily appeased?

Antonius: Oh, Octavius, no such scruples! Believe me, I have lived longer in the world, have more experience than you. Do you think that even a spark of patriotism still burns in them? Not at all. Through luxury and excess they have been so debased from the grandeur of soul of their ancestors that they no longer care about freedom. Only recently, after Caesar’s murder, when Brutus and Cassius stood on the rostrum and inflamed the people with hatred against great Julius to such a degree that they nearly laid hands on his sacred corpse in their fury—how much rhetoric did I need to shift their tone? Like feathers, they let themselves be blown this way and that. The soldier is already used to shedding the blood of citizens as well as of enemies, and he is on our side. With the common rabble it takes but a few words, a little grain or money, and some public spectacles.

Lepidus: I will take care of that item.

Octavius: You are entirely right, Antonius. That objection is now removed. But a Brutus, a Cassius, is far above the rabble’s sphere.

Antonius: Oh, they have lost all weight, all affection, all prestige through Caesar’s murder and my speech. The people are on our side. What, then, can they undertake? And until now they have been quiet.

Octavius: I received letters scarcely four hours ago stating that they are secretly preparing for resistance, fearing something from us. I meant to bring you the news immediately, but you were neither at the Capitol nor at home.

Antonius: I was at my country estate. That Brutus and Cassius are arming for war does not greatly trouble me. We are as much warriors as they. We must only be vigilant, unite our forces, and therefore immediately summon our legates and tribunes.

Octavius: But beyond them there are still many enemies who, though they wear friendliness on their faces, hide venomous daggers in their hearts. These should be removed from our path.

Antonius: Rightly said, my Octavius. We discussed this in our last meeting, named most of them, and swore them to death. Here, I have written them down. Read it.

Octavius (reads through and suddenly exclaims): Cicero too?

Antonius: Yes, Octavius. In the last meeting we resolved that each of us may choose someone he would gladly send to the realm of the dead. Cicero was my mortal enemy. His speeches and letters prove it all too clearly. And Lepidus even gave up his own brother.

Lepidus: Yes, I did.

Octavius: I can never revoke my given word, but the man pains me greatly.

Antonius: Here, Lepidus, read it too. My uncle Lucius appears on the list at your request. So we are balanced. Each of us has sacrificed a man dear to him for our common good. But let us now turn to another matter, namely, the division of the lands.

Octavius: That point, I think, we should let rest for now. Only after the subjugation of Brutus and Cassius shall we resolve it. But we must seriously consider countermeasures against these enemies.

Antonius: I suggest that you and I leave Rome, assemble our army, and then march upon them in their provinces. Lepidus can secure the city. Do you approve?

Octavius: Yes, entirely.

Lepidus: I also agree. I shall depart immediately and take the necessary steps.
(Lepidus exits.)

Antonius: There! Now he is gone, that simple man. Now I can speak more freely with you, Octavius. Should we let that barren head one day take part in ruling the world?

Octavius: It was you who drew him into this alliance. Now it can likely no longer be changed. I believe he has proven himself a good soldier in many places.

Antonius: Believe my words, I have come to know him. The man has no merits of his own, no intellectual faculties. He can only carry out orders well. Like a dead machine, he must be set in motion by others. Believe me, had he no powerful friends, it would never have occurred to me to admit him. We need him now, but I think, once we have reached the end of our course, once we are secure enough, we will rid him of his unearned honors, feed him on husks, or remove him entirely, and we will enjoy the harvest that he sowed and reaped for us.

Octavius: I leave that to your discretion. Let us speak further on this matter only after the successful completion of our designs. But now, Antonius, we must be cautious. Closer and more terrifying storms gather over our heads. Let us therefore quickly put ourselves into good order, so that we may defy the approaching, soon raging, tempest with courage.

Antonius: Yes, let us do so. I have a few matters to settle before our departure. Perhaps we shall speak again this evening. Until then, farewell.
(He exits.)

Octavius alone:
Foolishness left first, and then arrogance followed. What Antonius said about Lepidus is not untrue, but Antonius is proud, power-hungry, voluptuous, cruel. Once our enemies are defeated and Lepidus set aside, Antonius—proud of his deeds and experience—will want to lead me, a younger man, according to his own will. But he will not find in me a Lepidus. My unenslaved neck is not accustomed to bowing beneath the condescending gaze of a master. He will wallow in pleasures. I shall allow it for a time and remain silent. But when his body and soul are weakened and he stands in contempt, then shall I raise my head, show him my true greatness, and then—aut Caesar, aut nihil. Either he shall humble himself in the dust before me, or I shall prefer death to a life of disgrace.
(He exits.)

Some Remarks on the Representation of Magnitude
May 14, 1787

Everyone experiences daily—though they may not pay attention to it—that magnitude is a relative concept, i.e., that we measure all magnitudes according to a customary or the nearest available standard of measurement. From this general experience, many particular everyday phenomena can be explained. That we perceive a room that is not high as longer than another of the same length and width but greater height, comes, I believe, from nothing else. The nearest standard for measuring the length and width of a room is its height; when the height is small, and thus contained often within the length, we take it to be larger. In a higher room, by contrast, our standard of measure is not as often repeated in the length and width, and therefore it appears smaller to us by a natural effect. For the same reason, a vertically standing object—e.g., a rod—may appear shorter than when lying horizontally; in the former position we have no intermediate objects for comparison, while in the latter there are many that we can compare it to.

It should only be noted here that in both cases, the object must not lie too far from the eye; for a distant horizontal object appears smaller to us due to an optical observation, because the so-called visual angle is smaller, while an upright object appears larger for the opposite reason. This is also the reason that, in clear weather, the moon appears farther away when rising—because of the abundance of comparable, intermediate objects—than when it stands directly overhead, although we usually perceive it as larger at moonrise, which can be explained by the abundance of vapors that refract the rays.

But such illusions occur not only with distances; we can observe the same with time. The duration of a journey seems to pass much more slowly when we are on our way to a destination than on the return trip. Also afterward, the same feeling remains with us, because the representations of the many objects along the way cannot be united into one general representation, but we must think of the journey as a series of representations, if we are to properly recall it. From books, on the other hand—especially those that are not historical in content—there often remain only general impressions, although this may vary greatly depending on one’s faculties and inclinations.

(Meiners, Letters on Switzerland, Vol. 1, Letter VI, p. 371.)

When, apart from the lofty peaks of the highest mountains, the whole surrounding landscape is covered in night, the illuminated summits appear much lower than usual and at the same time as close as if they bordered the nearest valley.

On The Religion of the Greeks and Romans
August 10, 1787

As for the religion of the Greeks and Romans, they followed the path common to all nations. The idea of a deity is so natural to man that it has developed among all peoples. In their infancy, in the primitive state of nature, they imagined God as an all-powerful being who governed them and all things merely at will. They shaped their conception of him after the rulers they knew—fathers and patriarchs of families—who had absolute control over the lives and deaths of their subordinates, whose commands they obeyed blindly, even when unjust or inhuman, and who, as men, could become angry, act hastily, and regret their actions. Just so did they imagine their deity, and the conceptions of the majority of people in our much-praised enlightened age are no different. Misfortune—both physical and moral evil—they viewed as punishment from the deity and concluded that they must have knowingly or unknowingly offended it by actions that displeased it, thus incurring its wrath.

To appease this wrath, they offered gifts, the best of what they had—first fruits, even the dearest things, their children. These people had not yet understood that those evils were not real evils, that happiness and unhappiness depended on themselves, and that the deity never sends misfortune to the detriment of its creatures. Nor did they consider that the highest being is not won over by gifts from humans, and that humans can neither increase nor diminish its wealth, power, or glory. But how were they to offer those sacrifices? Since they saw that only substances dissolved in smoke rose to the clouds—and since they believed the deity dwelled there—they let their offerings rise up to it in the smoke of fire. This is the origin of sacrifices, which among the Greeks and Romans, as among the Israelites, constituted a main part of worship.

People, who can conceive of everything only through sensual representations, soon made bodily images of the deity out of clay, wood, or stone—each according to the ideal they had of the most awe-inspiring being. Hence the grotesque shapes and figures of the gods among primitive peoples without a sense of beauty or the arts. It was necessary that each give their god a special name. When multiple tribes united for a common purpose or otherwise intermingled, each retained its own god. But to make their union firmer, they had their respective deities also enter into a society and placed them all in one location, where the entire people worshipped them together. Greece and Rome had their Pantheon, and each city again had its own patron god. The fact that these nations were a mixture of many different peoples is the chief reason for their multitude of deities and for the diverse myths and tales concerning them.

Polytheism was further encouraged by the belief that the god, whose power they conceived as limited, was not strong enough to govern the whole universe alone. So they assigned the rule of each element, various tasks, and so forth to a particular god. They personified elements, lands, and other great objects, attributing their effects and changes to these as freely acting beings. It is also well known that they transferred meritorious heroes to the dwelling place of the gods after death and honored them like the gods themselves.

This great confusion in mythology was greatly increased by the efforts of scholars to discover the meaning of each myth. Special places were selected for the erection of images of the gods, and temples were built, all of which acquired great sanctity because people believed the god resided there. Heights and groves were particularly preferred, no doubt because their appearance was already awe-inspiring, and their apparent nearness to the sky made them seem especially suited as abodes of the gods—also because the soul of a solitary and deeply sensitive person is nowhere more enraptured than at the sight of a vast expanse, where one can take in a great portion of the beautiful creation at once, or in the stillness of dark forests, where it becomes ecstatic, begins to dream, and truly believes itself to see apparitions or a divinity.

A man filled with fear about something interprets all surrounding circumstances in that light and is frightened by everything. So too were those unenlightened people, full of imagination and fearful of their god, firmly believing that he directly caused all changes in nature and thereby revealed his will to them, and thus interpreted every unexpected event as such a revelation. A superstitious Greek, for example, would not cross the road if a weasel had run across it; he would consult an augur if a mouse had gnawed his sack of flour. Even in our time, people interpret the appearance of a comet as foretelling the death of a monarch, or the cry of an owl as announcing a person’s death.

Connected with this was the desire of men to look into the fates of the future. They believed that the gods, on whom they were dependent, might well lift the veil slightly and announce future events through signs or through human intermediaries who were thought to have closer contact with them.

All these tendencies were noted by the wiser and more cunning individuals, who were chosen to serve the deity. They saw that no means governed the people so readily as religion. Since it gave them the best opportunity to serve their own desires and passions, or even to work for the public good, by taking advantage of this obedience, they encouraged those inclinations, bound the imagination, and gave it direction and occupation through elaborate sensual ceremonies. Against all assaults of reason, they shielded themselves by connecting all their actions to religion, thereby sanctifying them. They partially removed the images of the gods from the public eye and access of the multitude, and by this secrecy bestowed upon them greater dignity and sublimity, allowing the imagination freer play. Through the oracles, the priests held influence over all important matters. In Greece, they were one of the bonds by which the jealous and divided city-states were held together and united in common interests.

Thus arose the religions of all peoples—so also the religion of the Greeks and Romans. Only when a nation reached a certain stage of culture could men of enlightened reason emerge among them, attain better concepts of the deity, and communicate them to others. From that point are also most of the writings we possess from antiquity. The earlier ones are valuable, at least from the standpoint of the history of humanity. They call upon us always to venerate a providence whose commands are not arbitrary but wise, directing all things with kindness and benevolence.

Correct understanding of the state of popular religion cannot, however, be gleaned precisely from the poets. They treated religion and the history of the gods as poets, each according to his purpose; only the common opinions had to serve as a basis. And this popular belief regarding the attributes and governance of providence remained nearly the same at all times. The common people of all nations ascribe sensual and human qualities to the deity and believe in arbitrary rewards and punishments. These notions, however, are the strongest restraint on their passions; the reasons of philosophy and a purer religion are not effective enough against them.

The wise men of Greece and their followers, on the other hand, show in their writings far more enlightened and exalted concepts of the deity, especially with regard to the fate of human beings. They taught that the deity gives everyone sufficient means and strength to attain happiness, and that the nature of things is such that true happiness is achieved through wisdom and moral goodness. On these principles, most agreed; only in their speculations about the primal being of the deity and other matters incomprehensible to man did they devise very different systems. From these perspectives, many aspects of religion, of which I have mentioned only a few, will appear neither so incomprehensible nor so ridiculous when we consider that human beings with the same faculties as ourselves, through unequal development and misguided direction of those faculties, strayed into such errors.

The manifold striving of these people to discover truth convinces us how difficult it is to reach a truth that is pure and untouched by error. It shows how man often remains halfway there, sometimes ventures further, sometimes strays from the right path, and often, deceived by a misleading semblance, seizes a shadow instead of reality. Both their failed and successful efforts are already-experienced lessons for us, from which we can profit without having been exposed to the same dangers. We can gather what is good and useful, and avoid their missteps.

From their history, we learn how common it is, through habit and tradition, to regard the greatest nonsense as reason, and shameful follies as wisdom. This should make us attentive to our inherited and perpetuated opinions, to examine even those against which doubt or suspicion has never crossed our minds—perhaps they are entirely false or only half-true. It should awaken us from the slumber and inactivity that so often make us indifferent to the most important truths. If these experiences have taught us to consider it possible, even likely, that many of our convictions may be errors—and many of those of others who think differently may be truths—we will not hate them, nor judge them uncharitably. We know how easy it is to fall into error and will therefore seldom attribute such errors to malice or ignorance, and thus become ever more just and humane toward others.

On Some Characteristic Differences of the Ancient Poets
August 7, 1788

In our time, the poet no longer has such an expansive sphere of influence. The famous deeds of our ancient, and even of our more recent, Germans are neither interwoven with our constitution nor preserved in memory through oral tradition. We learn of them only from history books, often of foreign nations, and even this knowledge is limited to the more educated classes. The tales that entertain the common folk are fantastic legends, which are neither connected to our religious system nor to actual history. Moreover, the ideas and culture of the social classes are now so disparate that a poet of our time could hardly hope to be universally understood or widely read. Thus, our great German epic poet’s wise choice of subject matter has not brought him into so many hands as would have occurred if our public institutions were Greek in character. One part of the audience has already distanced itself from the system on which the whole poem and its individual parts are based; another is too consumed by the concerns of increasingly numerous comforts and needs of life to find time or inclination to elevate itself and approach the ideas of the higher classes. What interests us now is the poet’s art—not the subject itself, which often leaves an opposite impression.

A particularly striking quality of the works of the ancients is what we call simplicity, which is more felt than precisely defined. It essentially consists in the fact that the writers portray the image of the thing faithfully, without seeking to make it more engaging through subtle details, learned allusions, or a slight departure from truth in order to render it more brilliant or attractive, as is commonly demanded today. Every emotion—even a complex one—they express simply, without distinguishing its manifold components as the understanding might, and without dissecting what is obscure. Moreover, the entire system of their education and cultivation was such that each person acquired their ideas through direct experience, and they did not know the cold book-learning that impresses only dead symbols upon the brain. With everything they knew, they could still say:

“How? Where? Why?” — they had learned it.

Thus each necessarily had a unique mental form and a system of thoughts of their own; they had to be original. We, on the other hand, are taught from youth onward a ready-made vocabulary and set of signs for ideas, and they rest in our minds without activity or use. Only gradually, through experience, do we come to know our store of knowledge and to associate actual meaning with the words—words that, for us, already function like molds shaping our ideas, with predetermined scope and limitation, and relations through which we are accustomed to see everything.

Here lies, incidentally, a chief advantage of learning foreign languages: we come to learn how to group or separate concepts more freely. From this modern mode of education it follows that, in some people, the sequences of accumulated ideas and learned words run parallel to one another without ever forming a unified system—often without even touching or intersecting.

Another characteristic feature of the ancients is that their poets especially depicted the outward, sensory phenomena of visible nature, with which they were intimately familiar—whereas we today are more informed about the inner mechanisms of forces, and in general know more about the causes of things than about how they appear. Among the ancients, everyone became familiar with the occupations of other classes through everyday life, without intentionally setting out to study them. Therefore, technical terms had not become common. Although we, too, have words to describe fine nuances in the changes of visible nature, they have become part of vulgar language or regional dialects.

In general, one sees immediately in the works of the ancients that they surrendered themselves calmly to the flow of their thoughts, creating their works without regard for an audience; whereas in modern works it is evident that the author composed them with the consciousness that they would be read, and almost with the idea that they were conversing with their readers.

We also see that in the still-prevailing forms of poetry, circumstances determined the direction of the genius of the original inventors. Nowhere is this influence so clearly seen as in the history of dramatic poetry. Tragedy originated in crude festivities held in honor of Bacchus, accompanied by singing and dancing (cf. Tibullus II.1.57; Horace, Ars Poetica, v. 220). From the reward given at these events, it took its name. At first, only one performer interrupted these festivities by recounting ancient divine myths. Aeschylus was the first to introduce two actors, to build a proper stage—where previously a hut (skēnē) made of branches had sufficed, partitioned into multiple chambers to allow different scenes. The audience had to move from one to the other. This was avoided with the construction of a proper stage, and subsequent poets maintained the unity of place, a rule they only rarely sacrificed to achieve greater poetic beauty (e.g., Sophocles in Ajax, v. 815 ff.). From its first true inventor, the language of tragedy also acquired that solemn dignity which has distinguished it ever since. It is evident from this how the unique form of Greek tragedy, especially the special function of the chorus, developed.

Had the Germans refined themselves gradually without foreign influence, their spirit would certainly have taken a different course and produced native German drama—instead of borrowing the form from the Greeks. Comedy had a similar origin in the rustic farces (phallic plays) of countryfolk and in the Fescennine verses of the Romans (cf. Aristotle, Poetics, Chapter II, §4; Horace, Epistles II.1, v. 139ff., and Wieland’s note thereupon). Nature itself taught even the most uncultured people a kind of primitive poetry, out of which art gradually developed what refined nations now call poetry.

Among the Athenians—of whom Juvenal said, natio comoeda est—this genre naturally flourished, whereas the serious Romans were less inclined to appreciate subtle comedy.

Only these two genres of dramatic poetry were known to the ancients. Some hybrid forms, invented to accommodate the overly adorned tastes of certain audiences (kat’ epikairian poiountes tois theatais, Aristotle, Poetics VII, §13), seem not to have endured for long.

From a Speech Upon Leaving the Gymnasium

So great is the influence of education on the entire well-being of a state! How strikingly we see, in the case of this nation, the dreadful consequences of its neglect. If we consider the natural capacities of the Turks and then compare them to the coarseness of their character and their achievements in the sciences, we will come to recognize and properly value our own great fortune—that Providence caused us to be born in a state whose prince, convinced of the importance of education and of the widespread benefit of the sciences, has made both a principal focus of his high concern, and has erected for his glory enduring and unforgettable monuments which even the most distant future generations will admire and bless.

Among the most eloquent and personally meaningful proofs of these excellent sentiments and this zeal for the welfare of the fatherland are the institutions of this school, which are founded upon the noble idea of educating useful and capable members for the needs of the state. That these institutions have been perfected in every possible way and maintained at all times in a flourishing state, we owe—after Karl—especially to you, most venerable men. Your tireless efforts must be revered with the deepest gratitude by anyone who holds the happiness of his country dear. Especially at this moment, we above all others have the most urgent reasons to surrender our hearts entirely to feelings of thankfulness toward the noble patrons and overseers of this institution.

Thanks to you for the invaluable and countless benefits that have been bestowed upon us from our earliest youth through your grace in this house, consecrated to the sciences and to education. Special thanks for the most gracious acceptance into the higher institutions intended for our further development, where, under your wise leadership and benevolent oversight, we now continue and complete our path on a new road. Here it is also our duty to publicly express our deepest gratitude to you, dearest teachers. Thank you for your instruction in all that is worth knowing, for your guidance in all that is good and noble. Thank you also for your fatherly correction of our many faults. Forgive us, venerable guides of our youth, for our transgressions against your admonitions—aimed always at our good—whose wisdom the inexperienced youth does not always know how to appreciate.

And you, best friends and fellow students, who still walk upon the same path that we, in part together with you, have now just completed—be assured that we already now begin to realize, though too late for what has passed, how every inattentiveness to the warnings of our teachers and superiors bears harmful consequences, and that we shall become ever more convinced of this truth as our experience and understanding mature.

The awareness of the importance of your vocation will continually renew your courage, and will gradually kindle a love for your occupation, which will reward you with a pleasure and happiness more profound, genuine, and enduring than the finest inventions of the senses could ever provide. Let us together resolve firmly to make ourselves worthy, through diligence and good conduct, of this care and these benefits. Give thanks with us to the most benevolent Being that He gave us precisely these teachers and these educators. Let us ask Providence to bless and reward their efforts; may it strengthen their powers and health, and let their years reach the furthest bounds of human life.

On Some Benefits We Gain from Reading the Classical Greek and Roman Authors

May the joyful consciousness of much accomplished good, and the peaceful retrospect on years past—the reward of a life marked by deeds—the delightful fruits of their efforts, now partly ripened and partly still in bloom, and the blessings of all the upright, sweeten for them the burdens of increasing years, and with the brightest serenity may they look forward to the eternity that recompenses all.

The esteem in which the ancient Greek and Roman writers have been held with nearly equal strength throughout all centuries—though admittedly not always for the same reasons—makes them necessarily significant for us. If they possessed no merits other than those once recognized in them, if they had no other use than that which was long made of them, they would likely only draw our attention in the way an old but useless armory might.

But without some intrinsic worth, they could hardly have maintained their place in our age, which finds them particularly well suited for intellectual formation, for the following reasons.

First, they are especially useful in enabling us to gather the concepts that constitute the material processed by the other powers of the soul. Even a modest familiarity with these works and personal experience show that these authors consistently drew their depictions from nature itself and reported only observations they had gathered firsthand. The study of their constitutions and educational systems shows us even more clearly how far removed their knowledge was from what Lessing in Nathan the Wise called the dead bookishness that stamps the brain with lifeless symbols—the sum of meaningless words with which our minds are filled from youth, and from which, for the most part, our system of thought is composed. The form of their intellectual development necessarily imprinted itself on their writings. Their descriptions of both visible and moral nature are for this reason more vivid and more immediately graspable.

In their abstract inquiries—whether moral or metaphysical—we find that their path of speculation always proceeds from experience, draws conclusions from observation, and builds further upon them. Moreover, due to the distinctive character and trajectory of their culture—which was only minimally influenced from without—they necessarily viewed things from different relational perspectives, and expressed these in their language. They thus had concepts we cannot possess, for we lack the corresponding words. Even if we happen upon such a relation or analogy by chance, the impression, for want of a word, is too fleeting for us to fix the vague concept in our minds.

In this respect, language is for us a limited collection of fixed concepts, through which we model everything we perceive or notice. One essential benefit of learning foreign languages is precisely this enrichment of our concepts—especially when the culture of the people who speak the language differs from our own. The ancients, and above all the Greeks—who are principally meant here, since Roman writings, considered apart from their content, are mostly imitations of the Greek—possessed in their language a remarkable wealth of terms for expressing visible changes in natural objects and phenomena, the subtlest shades of difference, and above all the various modifications of emotions, states of mind, and character.

Our language also has a considerable stock of such words, but it would be far richer were not many of them considered provincial or vulgar, and thus banned from the language of polite society and the books it reads. Attempts to translate such concepts into our own language give rise to a more precise examination of the subtleties of meaning, and to a more accurate usage of words. It is self-evident how such study of distinctions sharpens the understanding and strengthens intellectual acuity.

Beyond this, the ancient writers from the flourishing epochs of their nations’ cultures offer the great advantage of forming taste. Taste, in general, is the feeling for the beautiful. Already this is gain enough: the sensitive power of the soul is thereby awakened and strengthened. Genuine expression of feeling always touches the heart and awakens sympathy—which, under the pressures of modern life, is so often suppressed. And where could we expect better models of beauty than from a nation in which everything bore the stamp of beauty, where the aesthetic faculties had every occasion to flourish, and where sages and heroes made offerings to the Graces?

With regard to history, their historians are extremely valuable relics. They are of particular interest to us in two respects: first, in terms of historical craftsmanship, in which probably no nation surpassed them, and only a few matched them. The causes, motives, and course of events always unfold before our eyes in a perfectly natural manner. The characters and passions of the individuals involved reveal themselves through their actions, without the need for the historian to underline their traits. At the same time, the whole is conveyed in the noblest simplicity, both in expression and in thought.

Second, they are important with respect to the history of humanity. We see the human spirit develop in very specific conditions and circumstances. From the sequence and character of the extant writings, we can abstract a complete history of their culture, and illuminate many phenomena elsewhere as well. For example, many aspects of the culture, habits, morals, and customs of the Israelite people—which have had and still have such influence on us—can be explained and rendered more comprehensible by comparison. For the human spirit has always, in general, remained the same; only its development has been variously modified by the diversity of conditions.

Finally, since—as has already been said—the works of the ancients are particularly suited for acquiring concepts, we can see how highly suitable they are as a preparation for the study of philosophy. Through them, one already acquires a stock of abstract ideas and a thinking power that is at least somewhat exercised—especially since they contain, in many areas of this science, at least the seeds and first principles that have only more clearly been articulated and developed in modern times. The many contradictions among the ancient philosophers, particularly in their speculations on the practical part of philosophy, have at the very least made it easier to find the middle way where truth lies.

These are my remarks on some of the advantages offered by the study of the ancients. In more than a few places, they will likely lack proper precision and completeness.

This is neither the place, nor am I capable of saying much about what the more mature person finds in them in terms of content—one who can compare their observations with his own experiences and judge the various views and systems of happiness which mankind has pursued, observed, or himself partly lived through.

Four Sermons

(1792-1793)

I.
Isaiah 61:7–8

Instead of your shame there shall be a double portion; instead of dishonor they shall rejoice in their portion; therefore in their land they shall possess a double portion; they shall have everlasting joy. For I, the Lord, love justice; I hate robbery and wrong. I will faithfully give them their recompense, and I will make an everlasting covenant with them.

Nothing is more comforting, nothing more encouraging for our hearts than to occupy ourselves with thoughts of God’s great attributes. They awaken our deepest admiration, fill us with humility, and inspire us to worship the greatness of the Creator. Such reflection further brings with it the most compelling motives for joyful fulfillment of our duties—since neglecting them would be, at the same time, an offense against our greatest benefactor and an act of ingratitude toward Him. This reflection also strengthens our courage in suffering, teaches us to bear it patiently—knowing that it is God who has brought it upon us, and that all our destinies lie in the hands of the One who always wills our good.

Guided by the words of the text, I will speak of the justice of God:

as it manifests itself in punishment, and
as it manifests itself in reward.

I. God, our Creator, has written an indelible law into our soul, one that is independent of our senses and circumstances, and which is meant to be the steadfast rule of our actions. This law He has accompanied with a feeling that rewards good and dutiful actions with contentment, but becomes troubling and unpleasant in the case of contrary deeds. This voice of conscience, when we transgress this sacred law, pronounces a judgment of deserved punishment upon us, fills us with fear of inevitable consequences, or—even if we have nothing outward to fear—compels us to despise ourselves in our own eyes.

Besides this inner revelation given to every human being, God has revealed His will in many ways, more distinctly and clearly. That voice of conscience often requires more urgent stimulation to be awakened and strengthened within us. Even in a more natural state, sensuality rules so strongly in the human being that he gives little heed to the inner voice of reason and does not allow it the space to develop. All the more so when, from youth onward, we become accustomed to many needs, when so many things essential to our lives must often be acquired with great effort, or even by infringing on the rights of others—then the strengthened power of sensuality, so early planted into the soul, would scarcely meet resistance from our inner sense of right and wrong, if another, more powerful barrier were not set against this current. This barrier is the divine legislation revealed to us by God, partly in the Old Testament and more purely through His Son. This order corresponds exactly with what our conscience tells us, and we are so strongly bound to it that we feel absolutely obligated to observe it—or else appear despicable to ourselves and be convinced that we have earned the disapproval of others, the displeasure of God, and the loss of our blessedness.

Moreover, this divine law is so designed that only by following it can both the general welfare of humankind and the particular wellbeing of every individual be most surely attained. Only through the most faithful observance of these divine laws can the wish of every person to be happy—both here and in the world to come—be fulfilled. Conversely, he who turns away from the will of his Creator and the noblest impulse of his heart must expect the greatest degree of misery. According to His holiness and justice, God has so arranged our nature and the constitution of all beings outside us that punishment follows transgression. By its very nature, immorality must punish itself. Many ties bind us to this earth; many kinds of pleasures are prepared for our senses—but if a person lets himself be too strongly bound by these ties, if he indulges excessively in pleasure, he destroys his own constitution, renders himself incapable and unfit for higher and nobler enjoyments, and brings upon himself exhaustion and physical suffering, which further depress an already disturbed mind. This mind is tormented by remorse, by dissatisfaction, presents to him only the image of his own worthlessness, and torments him with the thought that he himself has caused these sufferings, that he has let the time given him for better occupations pass not only unused, but has even turned it to his own harm.

Other crimes lower him just as much, rob him of the respect and love of others, and deprive him of the favor and blessing of God. These misfortunes are further increased by others: the failure of his endeavors and schemes is often shared with one who had good intentions in his efforts—but the wicked man lacks the comfort of receiving compensation for fruitless labor; on the contrary, he is vexed to see his plans foiled and dreads punishment in the future.

Finally, God has threatened those who, despite so many encouragements toward good, do not walk the path He has laid out for us, with special punishments, which, according to His truthfulness, He will surely execute one day. And in doing so He acts all the more justly, since He has never withheld opportunities or encouragements to lead people toward the good; since He has beforehand made known these threats, so that everyone knows what fate awaits him; so that no excuse can be made that he was unaware of the law and the punishments attached to it.

As strict as God appears when He has cause to punish, so gloriously does He manifest His

II. rewarding justice, which is as inexhaustible as it is infinitely great. God does not repay us according to our sins, but according to His great mercy. Faithful fulfillment of duty, even if sometimes imperfect, God already rewards here with temporal happiness. The death of His Son has freed us from the fear of punishment, to which every human being was once subject, for all have sinned. And thus, joy and contentment may now enter undisturbed into the heart of the person who fears God and strives to do what is right in trust and reliance on Him and His help.

In his endeavors, because he uses righteous means, he is accompanied by success and blessing; or, if he finds that his plans fail, he is convinced that they did not accord with the design of Providence, and that it was therefore more advantageous for the whole and for him individually that they did not succeed. His peaceful conscience enables him to partake in pure joys and sweetens his enjoyment of them. The final transformation before which all humans tremble—death—is for him merely a transition to a new stage in the perfection of creation and the greatness of the Creator, a transition toward further development of his abilities and to greater joys.

II.

One of the most distinguished merits and most important blessings of the Christian religion is that it has taught us to recognize true virtues and distinguish them from false ones. All those loud, ostentatious virtues with which people often deceive others—and often themselves and their own conscience—lose their luster the moment they do not flow from the right source, when they are not grounded in love for God and love for fellow human beings. Only the person who acts from such motives is truly worthy of being called a Christian and acts in the spirit of Christ’s teaching. There are virtues which are easy to practice and which easily catch the eye, but which lack precisely that essential element which gives them worth in the eyes of God, and which is often the hardest to attain: namely, a complete transformation and betterment of the heart. Such a soul, purified of sensual passions, moved only by love for God and His commandments and by love for all people, alone is capable of the virtue that is the subject of our further reflection. I will, according to the instruction of today’s Gospel, speak about forgiveness and reconciliation—first, what kind of nature this virtue must have if it is to be genuine, and second, that we may only be assured of the forgiveness of our sins if we truly possess this virtue.

O God of love and peace, fill our hearts with Your Spirit, and make us ready and able to fulfill Your commandment that bids us to be patient with the faults of our fellow humans, to forgive those who offend us, and to love those who hate us. Amen.

Before we consider the nature that forgiveness must have, let us first seek the sources from which unforgiveness arises. Pride, or self-love—which leads to so many faults and vices—plays a primary role in this vice as well. We see it often among people, even among friends, that when one has offended the other, and both may be inclined toward reconciliation, yet pride or wounded self-love prevents either from taking the first step. Even if the offending party feels remorse, it is difficult for him to go to his brother and say, “I have wronged you, forgive me.” Not infrequently, however, we find even baser and more degrading passions at play in such states of heart: vengeance, hatred, and resentment often make us wholly unwilling to forgive. They close the heart against the voice of humanity, against the call of God. People who carry bitterness and hatred in their hearts are to be pitied no less than those who must associate with them. They embitter the lives of others whom they should make happy; they increase the burdens which they ought to help lighten and sweeten, and they render themselves incapable of enjoying even the good things which God bestows upon them with gratitude and joy. Because inner peace does not dwell in their hearts, they are not inclined to do good to others. Acts of kindness shown to them by other people or by God, or examples of generosity, make little impression upon them; they do not move them to gentleness and forbearance toward others.

Such a hardened disposition is vividly illustrated in today’s Gospel, where Christ presents to us a king who, moved by compassion for the misery he would cause through strictness, forgives a servant a large debt—far more than the servant could have ever hoped for. At most, he might have hoped for a partial remission of the debt or for an extension of time so that he could repay it without the ruin of his household. But this undeserved grace, instead of making him gentler and more forgiving, has the opposite effect: immediately afterward, he meets a fellow servant who owes him a small sum, especially in comparison to what he had just been forgiven, and he demands payment with the utmost severity, casting him and his family into ruin. Yet he did not long enjoy the fruit of his harshness and the slight gain it brought him. His fellow servants, outraged by this injustice, reported the matter to their master, who then judged him according to his deeds.

Let us apply this example to ourselves and ask whether we too do not often find ourselves in a similar situation. Every person will admit that they frequently need forbearance, and no one will claim to fulfill every duty without sometimes failing in one way or another, offending others in anger or the heat of passion, or simply out of bad temper. Each of us at times neglects to help the unfortunate as promptly or fully as duty requires and our circumstances allow. Every person will admit to faults for which they need forgiveness from others. Only pride and vanity could convince someone otherwise. But if one desires forgiveness from others and wishes not to be dealt with harshly, then one must likewise be gentle and forbearing toward others, bear the faults of one’s neighbors with love, and willingly forgive injuries. Still more will one realize that there is no reason to be harsh and unforgiving toward others when one reflects on how patient and long-suffering God has been toward oneself.

If we honestly examine ourselves, our conscience will soon teach us that we are unworthy of God’s many blessings, that we have not earned them by our behavior toward Him, and that, by our lack of forgiveness, we contradict both His law and His example, which He has given us to imitate and which should be our highest ambition and greatest honor. A spirit of unforgiveness is the very opposite of the spirit with which true Christianity should fill us, the opposite of the behavior by which, according to Christ’s own words, His true disciples are to be recognized: “Love one another,” He says, “by this shall all people know that you are my disciples.” Only such Christian love can enable us to truly forgive our offenders from the heart.

Therefore, when people do us wrong, when they harm our honor or anything else dear to us, this Christian love commands us not to return injury for injury, even if we are able to take revenge, even if we could do to them what they did to us. The Christian suppresses the desire for revenge—a desire which only base and coarse natures find sweet. But if forgiveness is to be complete, it must go even further: we must not harbor resentment in our hearts; even if we cannot love our enemies, we must not hate them, but rather extend to them our compassion.

There exists, beyond open revenge and returning evil for evil, a subtler form of vengeance that may be less dangerous for the one who commits it, but is often more hurtful for the victim: slander and malicious gossip. A slanderer may present himself as magnanimous, claiming he does not wish to retaliate, yet meanwhile secretly ruins the other’s good name—and thus harms him more than direct revenge ever could. Such behavior is the mark only of small and cowardly souls. A person sincerely committed to forgiveness will scorn it and instead do good to his enemy. He will not withhold his compassion and help, even when he sees him in misery. He will not remind the unfortunate person—who once did him harm—that now the power to repay him in kind is in his hands.

Equally far from true forgiveness is another false virtue that sometimes passes for magnanimity: when someone “forgives” their enemy, but secretly hopes and wishes that misfortune will eventually come upon him—and when it does, they cite Scripture to justify their attitude, saying, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord,” and greet the sufferer with the thought: “This is what you once deserved from me.” Such malicious glee has no place in a heart renewed by love for God. It may loathe wicked deeds, but it also pities those who commit them.

The true Christian is equally forbearing toward those faults and shortcomings of others that cause no personal harm. Rather than offer useless rebuke, he tries to lead them to betterment more through his example than by words. He is cautious in judgment, knowing that humans are too shortsighted to see into the hearts of others, that only the omniscient Creator can judge actions according to their true inner worth. Only He knows all the motives from which an action springs, the capacities granted to a person, and the circumstances which can exert powerful influence even on the most virtuous. The evil intentions we suspect in others’ actions often arise from our own corrupt hearts, which are conscious of acting with no better motives in similar cases. Whoever is truly concerned with doing good does not busy himself with finding faults in others and crying them out, but rather examines his own conscience, admits his own faults, and seeks to amend them. He bears the follies of others and does not grow weary of forgiving. It is not enough to think we have done something great by overlooking an insult once or twice, only to become angry when wrongs are repeated. When Peter asked the Lord whether it was enough to forgive his enemy seven times, Jesus replied: “Not only seven times, but seventy-seven times.” Your patience, your love for humanity must not be exhausted even by repeated offenses.

But one might ask: does the Christian religion command me to let others rob me of my possessions, my honor, to let myself be plunged into poverty and want without defending myself? Must I submit to the caprice and injustice of those who steal what is mine without resistance? Does Christianity demand too much of us?

One would misunderstand the spirit of Christ if they believed He required such things. On the contrary, we are to care for what is ours, to seek to increase it by just means, and to protect it against unjust claims. But if what is ours is taken from us, then Christian love requires that we pursue our right only so far as to recover what was taken—and renounce all vengeance.

Though the Gospel strongly urges patience toward the faults of others, it requires just as strongly that we not be lenient with ourselves. One might easily fall into the error of thinking that since one is patient with others and overlooks their faults, others will do the same for him. But such complacency would directly oppose the endeavor to become ever more perfect and to progress in goodness. Least of all may such a pact of mutual leniency be made with God. The true Christian must be strict with himself and gentle with others.

The most exalted model of such forgiveness, of a heart entirely free from resentment and bitterness toward its persecutors and filled only with compassion and love for them, is found in Christ Himself. Sent into the world to teach His fellow men the truth, to proclaim salvation and eternal blessedness, He is rejected by them and repaid with ingratitude. Even when His efforts bear little fruit among the masses, He does not tire of forgiving them their offenses. As He approaches Jerusalem and beholds the city sinking into ruin, He does not recall what He has suffered and is yet to suffer there. Instead, deep compassion moves Him to tears—not the impotent tears of wrath, but tears of sorrow. He foretells the destruction that awaits Jerusalem not as a wish, but with the deepest sadness.

Nor does He show the slightest schadenfreude, as many might feel when foretelling the misery of an enemy. When Peter, confident in his loyalty, believed he could follow Jesus into suffering and even death, Jesus told him with love that he would deny Him three times. And when Peter, later filled with shame, felt unworthy of his Master, Jesus did not withdraw His love or confidence, did not reject him as many would reject a friend who had failed them in distress. Instead, He showed him compassion and sympathy for the weakness of human nature.

The most sublime example of love for His enemies Jesus gave at last when, mocked, beaten, and nailed to the cross, He looked upon the whole crowd of His murderers—their coarse cruelty and triumphant malice—but this sight did not stir bitterness in His heart. At the hour of death—when a person often drops the mask worn through life—He showed the same serenity. Amid the torments prepared for Him by His enemies, He prayed to His heavenly Father, filled with compassion: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Let us not let this great example be presented to us in vain. With continual vigilance over the stirrings of evil inclinations in our hearts, let us strive to reach that high degree of love and forgiveness which Jesus displayed in the purest form: that neither self-love nor pride, nor lowly vengefulness make us unwilling to forgive; that only goodwill and joy in the happiness of others fill our hearts.

II. I still have briefly to show that we can only be assured of the forgiveness of our sins by God through sincere forgiveness and reconciliation. When John appeared among the people, he called them to repentance and to turn away from sin. Jesus gave us a higher commandment; He taught that it is not enough to guard against flagrant sins and prevent gross outbursts of passion, but that to be pleasing to God requires a heart entirely pure and filled with love. He gave us a new commandment—the commandment of love—which Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 13 in the spirit of Christ. Only such love can serve as the foundation for true faith—the kind of faith which, in childlike trust, commits itself to God in all circumstances, expects all happiness from His goodness, and bears misfortune with patience, because the thought gives it courage that even this has come from the hand of the Father and will turn to the best.

Not the faith that confesses Jesus merely with the lips, without producing the true fruits of faith—but only the faith that springs from love for Him—can become capable of the blessings God has bestowed on humanity through Christ. With such faith and such love, forgiveness is most intimately connected; it is the true distinguishing mark of genuine faith. How can someone love God, whom they do not see, while hating their brother, whom they do see? How can love for God coexist with hatred and harshness toward human beings? In a heart filled with thoughts of God, with reverence for the most exalted Being, there is no place for base passions, for malicious joy or hardness of heart. Such a heart sees all people as children of one Father and loves them as brothers. It is ready to be patient with their weaknesses, to forgive them their faults, and may then be assured that Jesus will not leave unfulfilled the promises He has attached to such forgiveness. “If you forgive people their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.” Only then can we hope that God will hear our daily petition in the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive…” In this, we pronounce our own sentence: we ask God to forgive our debts and, at the same time, pledge to extend love to our neighbor. Let us, my friends, walk in this divine spirit, follow the commandments and example of Christ, so that we may have hope of sharing in the blessedness He has won for us through His suffering and death, and that we may enter the abodes of peace—where we will no longer have any wrongs to forgive, but where God will still have much to forgive us.

Through meekness (fulfill only the duty),
You will conquer your enemy.
O do not rob your soul
Of this divine delight;
Then the Lord will also forgive you,
Be your Father and your Rewarder.

Lord, in obedience to You,
I will not avenge myself;
I forgive gladly, and then for me
The righteous cause will speak.
The spirit of gentleness comes only from You—
Through Your Spirit, Lord, give it to me!

III.

On the Feast of St. Philip and St. James, 1793

To attain true faith and, as far as it is possible for human beings, complete virtue, long practice is required. The corrupted heart of man, the power of sensuality—an example is found in the Apostles, whose memory we celebrate today. They had already received Jesus’ instruction into the third year, and could still ask questions of Him to which any of us would now know how to give the answer. The extraordinary nature of the event—they saw Him act like an ordinary man, He walked among them as one of their own; they indeed saw that God gave Him special assistance, they had an intimation of His future glory—but they had not yet experienced the resurrection of Christ, the cornerstone of Christian faith.

Even though we now know more about the person of Christ than the Apostles did at the time of the conversation we read in today’s Gospel, we must not assume that true faith consists merely in knowledge—that the more our memory can recall, the firmer, better, or more living our faith becomes. True faith must be grounded on the conviction that the Father dwelled in Jesus—and then we will also perceive the genuine fruits of faith.

What true faith must be like:

Founded on the conviction that Christ was truly the Son of God.
The nature of true faith is to be known by the works it produces.

You have placed us, O God, in a position where we are raised from youth in your blessed religion; from youth we learn that Jesus is your only begotten Son, whom you sent into the world to show us the path to eternal life. Grant that this knowledge may become living faith in us, that it may abound in good fruits. Bestow upon us, O God, your Spirit, that He may guide us into all truth and to all good. Amen.

I. Why are we called Christians? Not because we know that Christ is the founder of our religion, but:

a) True knowledge of God already requires us to view Christ in this light—this great arrangement and benefit for humanity—a greater proof of His goodness demands greater gratitude, greater love, and a closer union with Him. Christ alone opened the way to God. (Ephesians 2:18)

b) Christ Himself required us to regard Him as such. He must have known best whence He came, who had sent Him, and what charges God had given Him concerning mankind. Our trust must rest on His assurances.

c) And not only on His assurances, but also on His works (John 15:24); for sensual people need such signs.

B) Testimonies of the Father: at His birth, at His baptism, and also in John 12:28. The greatest testimony: His resurrection from the dead—the power of the Father—and finally His ascension.

II. This faith is not merely a matter of the intellect.

a) But neither is it an enthusiastic, miraculous faith, as there are still people who take our Gospel text as an excuse for such beliefs. This is a misunderstanding—it applies only to the Apostles and the earliest days of Christianity, when extraordinary arrangements were needed for the spread of the faith. Our passage refers only to the Apostles, as does Matthew 17:19–20. But even in Apostolic times such miraculous gifts were not always evidence of true faith (Matthew 7:22). We are so prone to cling to the external—like the Jews, we desire signs and wonders—and we do not press inward to the spirit, to the power.

b) What are the true fruits of faith? “By their fruits…” etc. Not prayer or fasting—the Pharisees (Matthew 6:1–2). The purpose of doing good—not to boast in prayer (Matthew 6:5). In general, not external actions—God sees the heart. The widow who gave but a mite into the treasury. Do we believe we render service to God thereby? Do we glorify Him? He remains what He is. It is easier to perform outward religious actions than to restrain one’s desires, favorite inclinations, and evil lusts of the heart—our corrupted nature—the flesh lusts against the spirit—the spirit is weak. The commandment of love.

c) If we make the effort, God aids our weakness, He supports us with His Spirit, who will dwell within us so that we may be one with Him as Christ is one with Him—that we may be perfect as Christ was—into friendship, freedom, and sonship with God.

IV.

On Matthew 5:1–16, 3rd Sunday after Trinity, 1793

Our text is taken from the Sermon on the Mount, the essential compendium of the duties Christ demands from his true disciples, in which he fully portrays the spirit by which a true citizen of the Kingdom of God must be animated. Moreover, most of Jesus’ teachings, and the many beautiful parables preserved for us in the Gospels, aim toward this same goal: to lead his disciples—and us—toward the correct understanding of the Kingdom of God, and to educate and form us into citizens of this Kingdom. Let us speak, then, of the Kingdom of God, and

I. Show that it is not something external, but internal.
II. That Christ has opened the way to it.

You, only begotten Son of the heavenly Father—whom the power of God has raised as Lord over all things, as ruler and king of this spiritual, this heavenly Kingdom—and you, Spirit of the Son, take your dwelling in our hearts, that we may learn to despise the earthly, and become children of God, heirs of the light. Hear our daily prayer, that your Kingdom may also come to us, and that your will be done on earth as it is done by your saints in heaven. Amen.

I. Jesus came into the world to call sinners to repentance, to proclaim to them that the Kingdom of God is at hand—he came into the world to secure our access to it, and to teach us the path by which we may become worthy citizens of this Kingdom.

a) This Kingdom is not a worldly state—as his disciples and contemporaries long hoped it would be. But everything in his teaching testifies against this expectation. His form was that of a servant; he renounced the power with which he could have established such a realm. Before Pilate he declared plainly: My kingdom is not of this world. What is considered great in this world is not so in the Kingdom of God.

b) Nor is the Kingdom identical with the visible church. We all call ourselves Christians—the Christian religion is widespread across the earth—today it is proclaimed from the pulpits of half the world—the teaching of Christ is preached, his name praised everywhere, before his majesty knees are bent, worship offered. But is that already the Kingdom of God? Are we, by external association with the church, thereby made citizens of the Kingdom of God? That we confess his name outwardly, are baptized in his name, say “Lord, Lord,” partake of the Lord’s Supper?

c) The Kingdom of God does not manifest itself in external ceremonies. Worship of God is not rooted in outward religious service (Luke 17:20–21). Baptism, participation in the Eucharist, confession with the mouth—these do not yet make us children of God. The Spirit of Christ must dwell in us; it is this Spirit that must teach us to pray to God. The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. We must be born again by the grace of God (John 3:3; 1 Peter 1:22–23), put off the old man and put on the new (Ephesians 4:22–24), clothe ourselves with Christ (Romans 13:14).

When we are thus born of God—when we have become new men, that is, when we have died to sin, laid aside our evil habits, become masters over our sensuality, when our hearts have been improved through love for God and Christ, so that we fulfill his commandments willingly and joyfully—then we are citizens of his Kingdom, then the Kingdom of God has come upon us, then we are assured of our future salvation.

This Spirit of God causes us to be poor in spirit and humble, peaceful, and comforted in suffering—for it assures us of the hope that we shall be comforted, that we shall be called children of God and shall see God.

II.

a) That it is difficult—whoever imagines it to be easy either lacks knowledge of their duties and what is required for perfection, or suffers from complacency and pride, refusing to acknowledge the innate corruption of the human heart, the power of the world and its lusts, the force of habit and favorite inclinations, and a deep attachment to the treasures of this earth (Matthew 19:24).

b) As hard as it is, God offers comfort (v. 26). However mighty sin may be, the grace of God is mightier still. God does not demand more of a person than he can bear. He has opened for us in Christ a source of salvation and blessedness. Christ has freed us from the bondage of Mosaic law, and now we may expect not punishment from God, but help and salvation.

Yet this does not mean we are already entirely free, already raised to the status of children of God. We are no longer under the dominion of the Law, but still under the bondage of sin, under a superficial service of words. We can only become free through firm faith in the grace and promises of God, and in the merit of Christ. This confidence, this faith, is supported by the Spirit of God. But man must not remain inactive; he must never grow weary in combating his self-love, his lusts, and his desires—only then can true faith arise, a faith fruitful in good works, a faith that makes a person peaceful, humble, merciful, and courageous in suffering.

If we possess such a faith, then we are children of light—that is, we hate the works of darkness, wickedness which must hide, and we love truth in word and deed, truth which may appear openly before all. Then we are sons of God—that is, we place childlike trust in Him, as a child expects good gifts from his father, so we hope for all good things from Him—and we do receive them from Him. Thus the Spirit of God dwells in us, thus we are citizens of the Kingdom of God—that is, fellow citizens of that Kingdom in which God is worshiped as the highest lawgiver and ruler, in spirit and in truth—not with cries of “Lord, Lord,” but through imitation, according to human frailty, of His will. We are diligent in good works, let our light shine before men, and offer Him the most pleasing worship: that we do good and what is right. Then we are heirs of His blessedness, which He has prepared for all who forsake the broad road of vice and enter through the narrow and difficult gate of Christian virtue into His Kingdom, and will be richly rewarded in heaven.

How blessed he who is born of Thee,
Receives from Thee a heart renewed,
And chosen for Thy own shall be,
Who shuns all sin, in holy mood,
And lives divine! How blest is he,
Thy child, Thy own—
The true Christian indeed.

Studies

(1792/93–179)

In What Respect Is Religion…

In what respect is religion to be appreciated as subjective or as objective—particularly with regard to feelings? Objective religion is rather theology (see Fichte’s Introduction). How far may reasoning intervene before it ceases to be religion? From this question, the common invective against idolaters is to be judged.

Sacrifices and the concepts on which they are based can never be introduced into a people that has attained a certain degree of enlightenment! They must have arisen from the childlike spirit of a nation and have been propagated by tradition. How can they, once established, endure within an enlightened nation? What is required, or what sustains them, is a spirit of cheerfulness, of well-being—an offering presupposes voluntariness.

Whatever absurd notions the Greeks may have had of their gods, however contradictory they may appear to our ideal (cf. Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, p. 101), however debasing—one must consider that these were intimately connected with the general concept of fate—a thoroughly human theory. Ridiculous by contrast is the rationalistic speculation on God’s permission of certain events—and the supposed grounds for such divine permission, by which one seeks to “rescue” divine providence (cf. Campe’s Discovery of America).

Parallel between priests and pastors.

Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, p. 125: The Jewish nation demanded a king—people would rather obey a monarch than be continually bothered by the nagging of their equals. Many a peasant is more hostile to his advocate, judge, etc., than to the oppression and exactions of his princes on a grander scale. That, Mendelssohn says (p. 121), is the spirit of the Jewish religion.

The Christian [cf. Tertullian, Apologeticus, c. 39], and after the Reformation, when people sought to restore the purity of religion and morals of the early centuries—censorship, ecclesiastical penance; among the Jews, too much penitential ritual and punishment—pettiness of character—instead of shaping national character on a grand scale: petty despotism, etc. Did the Jewish ceremonial law unite public and private religion?

What is the role of a general teacher and overseer in a religion that is essentially private religion? Censorship, individual education, correction, exhortation—such a role is incompatible. What is the real relation and proper office of our pastors?

Piety among the Greeks and Romans.

Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, p. 121: With the destruction of the temple—thus lived the Roman and the Greek in his homeland. Cato embraced his whole fatherland, and the fatherland filled his whole soul. Cosmopolitanism is only possible for a few; wherever it arises, the state must already be flawed—thus it was also for the early Christians (Tertullian, c. 38).

[Margin note: The Reformers recognized the value of subjective religion and strove to improve humanity thereby; they sought to render this art into a system of words. This is still evident in all theological compendia, where the loci from the locus de gratia to the unio mystica occupy a large and significant place. But today it is recognized that subjective religion cannot be forced into a dogmatics, and objective religion is preferred—more efficient in a compendium, perhaps, but as a means of moral reform it is futile. Today one is learned—the locus de scriptura sacra now takes a large place, whereas older compendia presupposed the scriptural ground of belief in God.]

“One size fits all” thinking—despite nature’s diversity. The issue is not merely that one wants to claim all men have the same duties, that the same thing is duty for all; rather, one wants to force the pathology of the human soul into a single model. What results from this? (cf. Longinus, ch. ult.) Justice has its laws and they perhaps concern individuals more directly—who would presume to prescribe laws for the passions in general? For whom are the innumerable cautionary rules in moral treatises? For perhaps one single person.

The entire array of motives and drives by which such-and-such virtue is motivated—the entire apparatus of restrictions and qualifications delineating how far one may go in each passion, in each active force of the senses—is suited to perhaps only one individual. Only in the already wise and good are these motives effective. They are, at best, rules by which I might shape this or that person—but that is the slow work of private cultivation.

A Christian is supposed to be a perfect person! If he sins, he ceases to be a Christian—quoad ecclesiam invisibilem—yet he still professes the popular religion, still remains a member of the Christian Church. What is the Christian Church? A multitude of individuals (not a unified community of individuals) who have achieved a certain moral perfection. Or is Christianity merely a popular religion—the memorization of dogma—which the wicked Christian has in common with the true one?

Petty virtuous acts—no greatness—a communal spirit that sets aside petty passions and knows how to act for the whole—many small things make one great effect, which may be quite meager, quite impoverished.

Is this the joint effect of religion and despotism?

Why are women more religious than men?

[Margin note: The Christian religion, as a popular religion, required public ecclesiastical discipline—and this is wholly unnatural, ineffective, and harmful, because of the immense shame it imposes.]

But the Principle Material…

But the principal mass, the material out of which everything is actually formed, is nothing but sensibility.

The well-known result—mentioned here only because it is so often overlooked—is that the human being is a being composed of both sensibility and reason. That each human being under— (breaks off)

Atheism appears to the common crowd as such a dreadful vice—or even the mere deviation from common notions of the deity is immediately branded as atheism—because all the feelings of humility, gratitude, all hopes, were bound to these notions. And this entire fabric of feeling is torn apart, destroyed, when those conceptions are altered.

The Greeks and Romans permitted an Aristophanes, a Plautus, to mock their gods, to ascribe to them the most ridiculous actions—as long as the playwright left intact their characteristic symbolic representations. Jupiter could err as much as he liked, as long as he retained his thunderbolt. He could appear in Prometheus as a tyrant—but they would not forgive a Socrates or an Aristotle for showing them ton theon in a pure idea, elevated above thunderbolts and loincloths.

The Christian religion has produced many martyrs—heroes in suffering, but not heroes in action.

By impressing upon people the many separate duties in their particularity, one blurs the greatness—the wholeness—one loses sight of the greater whole. The sense of how much one ought to do becomes confused, and the awareness of one’s own strength is not allowed to emerge. The spirit from whose abundance virtue and all dutifulness must spring is not cultivated.

The Christian religion offers a vast realm for the imagination, from which our great Christian epic poets have drawn more majestic images, more dreadful scenes, and more moving traits than had ever before entered a poet’s soul. But the imagination of the common people has no guidance—no beautiful representations of these images set before them, neither in painting, nor in sculpture, nor in poetry—nothing to follow, nothing to cling to. And this would also seem unsuitable for a religion which teaches to worship God in spirit and in truth, and which, by its original essence, declared war on all images of divine beings.

[Margin note continuation: But they have not descended to the common people—they cannot, for they are not publicly recognized, they are not sanctioned by anything. Moreover, a reason capable of grasping the idea behind such a poem—a heart capable of deep and refined feeling—will, in turn, reject much of what is digestible and believable for coarser people, who for their part would pass over the higher beauties meant for cultivated reason and a sensitive heart.]

Our Tradition…

Our tradition—folk songs, etc.

There is no Harmodius, no Aristogeiton, whom eternal fame accompanied because they struck down the tyrant and gave equal rights and laws to their fellow citizens, who lived on in the mouth of our people, in its songs—

What constitutes the historical knowledge of our people? They lack a distinctive, patriotic tradition—
Memory and imagination are filled instead with the primeval history of humanity, with the history of a foreign people, with the deeds and misdeeds of their kings, which concern us not at all—and wit exercises itself just as easily upon their absurdities as Aristophanes’ wit once did upon his gods.

[Margin note, deleted: We teach our children table prayers, morning and evening blessings…]

Already in the Architecture…

Already in the architecture, the differing genius of the Greeks and the Germans reveals itself. The former lived freely, in wide streets; in their houses were open, uncovered courtyards; in their cities, frequent large squares. Their temples were built in a beautiful, noble style—simple like the spirit of the Greeks, sublime like the god to whom they were consecrated. The images of the gods—supreme ideals of beauty—the most beautiful human form as it might emerge in the dawn of resurrection—everything portrayed in the highest intensity of being and life; no images of decay—the hideous mask of death, among them, was the gentle genius, the brother of sleep.

Whatever is beautiful in Catholic worship is borrowed from the Greeks and Romans—the fragrant incense, the beautiful Madonnas—but the churches are Gothic masses; the greatest works of art usually buried in a corner and heaped over with childish, petty ornamentation—like a child who cannot yet grasp something great, something sublime, whose soul has not yet reached the youth or manhood of taste.

The forms of other images are taken from the clumsiest human types that surround the painter. If the faces express emotion—pain or joy—they are grinning caricatures, contorted distortions of the muscles. The brush that produced most of the older paintings seems to have been dipped in night—the appearance is gloomy—no bright, joyful imagination animated them.

Our cities have narrow, stinking streets—the rooms are cramped, darkly paneled, with dim windows—large halls are low and oppressive when one is inside them—just to have nothing free or open, pillars were placed in the middle wherever possible. It is more intimate to sit together in a small room—more domestic. Formerly, indeed, rooms were large, but typically the entire household was in them—servants and maids—there one slept and dined. The earlier spirit of the Germans, especially in terms of culture, was domesticity—their greatest delight, for example, frightful drinking—in general (as also in loyalty and faith), solidity. The joy of the Greeks was purer—more cheerful—more moderate—more lighthearted.

The Germans did not drink a carefree, Socratic cup—but goblets over which one either bellowed like a bacchant—or, if more moderate, still drank with concern. The Gothic architecture: eerily sublime.

Religion Is One of the Most Important Matters…

A.1)
Religion is one of the most important matters of our lives. As children, we were already taught to stammer out prayers to the deity; already our little hands were folded, to raise them toward the Most High. Into our memory was loaded a collection of phrases—then still incomprehensible—for future use and comfort in our affairs.

As we grow older, occupations related to religion fill a great part of our lives; indeed, for some, the entire orbit of their thoughts and inclinations is connected to it, just as the outer rim of a wheel is connected to its center. Aside from other occasional festivals, we dedicate to it the first day of each week, which has appeared to us from our youth on in a more beautiful and festive light than all other days. We see around us a special class of people exclusively designated for the service of religion; to all the major events and actions of human life—on which private happiness depends—already at birth, in marriage, at death and burial, something religious is added.

Does the human being, when older, reflect on the nature and qualities of this being—especially on the relationship of the world to this being—toward which all his feelings are directed? Human nature is so constituted that what is practical in the doctrine of God—what becomes for him a motivating force for action, a source of the knowledge of duties, and a source of consolation—readily presents itself to the unspoiled sense of man. And the instruction we are given from youth about it—the concepts, all the outward forms connected to it, and everything that makes an impression on us—is of such a kind that it is grafted onto a natural need of the human spirit—often immediately, but sadly too often only through arbitrary connections, neither grounded in the nature of the soul, nor in the truths to be drawn from the concepts themselves and developed from them.

…of human life, to set it in motion—the exalted demands of reason upon humanity, whose legitimacy we so often acknowledge with full conviction when our hearts are filled with it—and the attractive portrayals that a pure and beautiful imagination paints of innocent or wise human beings—these should never so overpower us that we begin to hope to find much of them in the real world, or believe we might catch sight of this beautiful mirage here or there in reality. Discontent with what we actually encounter, a gloomy disposition, would then more rarely cloud our minds.

Let us not be alarmed, then, when we find ourselves compelled to acknowledge that sensibility is the principal element in all human action and striving; how difficult it is to distinguish whether mere prudence or genuine morality is the determining ground of the will. If the pursuit of happiness is accepted as the highest aim of life, and if one simply knows how to calculate well, it will produce externally much the same results as if the law of reason determined our will. Just as in a moral system, pure morality must be strictly separated from sensibility in the abstract, and the latter subordinated to the former—so too must we, in considering the human being as a whole and human life in its entirety, above all take into account his sensibility, his dependence on both external and internal nature—on that which surrounds him and in which he lives—and on his sensuous inclinations and his blind instinct.

The nature of man is, as it were, only impregnated with the ideas of reason. Like salt that permeates a dish and, when properly prepared, should never appear in lumps, yet imparts its flavor to the whole; or like light that penetrates everything, fills all, manifests its influence throughout nature, and yet cannot be represented as a substance—though it gives form to objects, refracts differently in each, and draws forth healing air from plants—so too do the ideas of reason animate the entire web of human feeling. Through their influence, actions appear in their own particular light. The ideas themselves rarely show their essence directly, but their effect permeates everything like a subtle matter, giving each inclination and impulse its own specific tone.

A.1)
It lies in the very concept of religion that it is not merely a science of God—of His attributes, of our relation and the world’s relation to Him, and of the continued existence of our soul—something which might be, in some cases, acceptable to us through reason alone, or made known to us by some other means. Nor is it merely historical or rational knowledge. Rather, religion concerns the heart; it exerts an influence on our feelings and on the determination of our will. This is the case in part because our duties and the laws gain greater weight by being presented to us as laws of God, and in part because the idea of God’s sublimity and goodness toward us fills our hearts with awe, with feelings of humility and gratitude.

Religion therefore imparts to morality and its motives a new, more exalted momentum; it provides a new, stronger dam against the force of sensuous impulses. For sensuous beings, religion is also sensuous—its moral incentives must themselves be sensuous in order to be capable of acting upon the sensuous nature. Admittedly, in so doing, they often lose some of their dignity insofar as they are moral motivations; but they have, through this very adaptation to our feelings, taken on such a deeply human appearance, have conformed themselves so well to our affective nature, that—attracted by our hearts and flattered by the beauty of the accompanying imagery—we often forget that a cold reason might disapprove of such representations, or even forbid us from speaking of them at all.

When one speaks of public religion, one understands by this the concepts of God and immortality, and whatever is related to them insofar as they constitute the conviction of a people, and insofar as they exert an influence on the actions and mode of thought of that people. Furthermore, this also includes the means by which these ideas are, on the one hand, taught to the people, and on the other, made compelling to their hearts.

By this influence, not only the immediate effect is to be understood—for instance, that I do not steal because God forbade it—but especially the more remote effects must be taken into account and are often to be valued as more important. These include above all the elevation and ennoblement of a nation’s spirit—that the so often dormant feeling of its dignity be awakened within the soul of the people, that it not cast itself away nor allow itself to be cast away, that it not only feel itself as human, but that also gentler hues of humanity and goodness be introduced into the overall picture.

The principal doctrines of the Christian religion have, since its inception, largely remained the same; yet depending on the historical circumstances, one doctrine has at times been entirely cast into shadow, while another has been elevated, brought into the light, and—at the expense of the obscured one—distorted, either overextended or overly restricted.

The entire body of religious principles, and of the sentiments that flow from them, and especially the degree of intensity with which they can influence modes of action, is the central point of a people’s religion. Upon a subjugated spirit, one that has lost its youthful vigor under the weight of its chains and begins to grow old, religious ideas make little impression.

The youthful genius of a people… the aging one—

The youthful genius feels itself and exults in its strength, flies with hunger for the new, becomes deeply engaged, but may then abandon it again and seize upon something else—yet it can never be something that would wish to lay fetters upon its proud and free neck. The aging genius, by contrast, is marked above all by firm attachment to inherited tradition in every respect, and thus wears its fetters like an old man wears his gout: grumbling over it, but unable to cast it off. It allows itself to be pushed and pulled according to its ruler’s will, yet it enjoys only with a half-conscious mind—not freely, not openly, not with that cheerful and radiant joy that invites others to share its sympathy. Its festivals are chatter, just as nothing pleases an old man more than idle talk—not loud exclamation, not full-blooded enjoyment.

Distinction between objective and subjective religion — importance of this distinction with respect to the entire question.

Objective religion is the fides quae creditur—the faith that is believed. Understanding and memory are the faculties that operate here, as they investigate, contemplate, retain, or at least believe the doctrines. Practical knowledge may also belong to objective religion, but only insofar as it remains a dead capital. Objective religion can be systematized in the mind, reduced to a book, and delivered to others in speech. Subjective religion, by contrast, expresses itself only through feelings and actions. When I say of a person “he has religion,” I do not mean he possesses extensive knowledge of it, but rather that his heart feels the deeds, the wonders, the nearness of the divinity; that he recognizes and sees God in nature, in the destinies of human beings; that he casts himself down before Him, thanks Him, and praises Him in His works.

He does not act merely according to whether something is good or prudent; the thought that it is pleasing to God is itself a motive—often the strongest one. In joy, in a moment of happiness, he simultaneously casts a glance toward God and thanks Him. Subjective religion is living: it is activity within the being, and outward action. Subjective religion is something individual; objective religion is abstraction. The former is like the living book of nature—plants, insects, birds, and animals, each living from and with one another, each alive, each enjoying; they are intermixed—everywhere one encounters all types together. The latter is like the cabinet of the naturalist, who has killed the insects, dried the plants, stuffed the animals or preserved them in alcohol—and has arranged everything together that nature had separated, ordering them all according to a single purpose, whereas nature had interwoven an infinite diversity of purposes in a harmonious whole.

The entire body of religious knowledge belonging to objective religion may be the same among a great people—it could even, in itself, be the same across the entire earth. It is interwoven with subjective religion, but constitutes only a small, and rather ineffectual, part of it. It is modified differently in each individual person. What is decisive in the case of subjective religion is whether—and how far—a person’s soul is disposed to be determined by religious motives; how sensitive it is to them; and then, what kinds of representations make the greatest impression on the heart; which types of feelings are most cultivated in the soul and most easily aroused.

One person may have no receptivity for gentler representations of love; motives drawn from the love of God may make no impression on his heart. His coarser faculties of feeling are stirred only by fear—by thunder and lightning. The strings of his heart do not resonate with the gentle tones of love. Others are deaf to the voice of duty—it is useless to point them to the inner judge of actions, who has erected his tribunal in the heart of man: that voice has never spoken within them. Self-interest is the pendulum whose oscillations keep their mechanism in motion.

On this disposition—on this receptivity—depends how subjective religion should be shaped in each individual. Objective religion is taught to us from early youth in schools; it is imposed on our memory so early that the still-unformed understanding, the beautiful tender plant of open and free thinking, is often pressed down under the weight—or, like roots that struggle through loose soil, absorbing and intertwining with it and drawing nourishment from it, yet bent aside by a stone and forced to seek other directions. So the burden placed on the memory remains unresolved; the maturing faculties of the soul either shake it off entirely, or leave it aside without drawing any nourishing sap from it.

In every person, nature has implanted a seed of the finer feelings that arise from morality—a sense for moral things, for purposes beyond mere sensuality. That these beautiful seeds do not wither, that a true receptivity for moral ideas and sentiments develops—this is the task of education, of cultivation. Religion is not the first thing that can take root in the soul; it must encounter a prepared soil in which it can then flourish.

Everything depends on subjective religion; this alone has a true value. Let the theologians argue over dogmas, over what belongs to objective religion, over the precise formulation of its doctrines. Every religion rests on a few fundamental principles that, across the different religions, are more or less modified, distorted, or presented more or less purely. They form the foundation of all belief, of all the hopes that religion offers us. When I speak of religion, I abstract entirely from all scientific—or rather, metaphysical—knowledge of God, of ourselves, and of the world’s relation to Him. Such knowledge, which involves only the reasoning faculty, is theology, no longer religion. I count only that knowledge of God and immortality as religion which the needs of practical reason require, and whatever stands in a readily comprehensible connection with it. Closer inferences regarding particular dispensations of God for the benefit of mankind are not excluded.

I speak of objective religion only insofar as it constitutes a part of subjective religion.

My intention is not to examine which religious doctrines most stir the heart, which offer the soul the greatest comfort and elevation—not how the teachings of a religion must be constituted in order to make a people better and happier—but rather, what institutions are required so that the doctrines and the power of religion may be woven into the fabric of human feeling, joined to the springs of action, and manifest themselves in them as living and effective—so that they become wholly subjective. Once they do, religion does not express its existence merely through folded hands, bent knees, and the bowing of the heart before the holy; it spreads into all branches of human inclinations (without the soul necessarily being conscious of it) and works everywhere—though only indirectly. It acts, so to speak, negatively: in the joyful enjoyment of human pleasures or in the performance of noble deeds and the exercise of gentler virtues of love for mankind, even if it does not act directly, it nonetheless exerts a subtle influence in that it allows the soul to remain free and open in its activity, without paralyzing the sinews of its energy.

For the expression of human powers—whether of courage, of compassion, or of joyful vitality and enjoyment of life—freedom from malicious moods of the soul such as envy and similar tendencies is necessary; innocence, a clear conscience—and these two qualities religion helps to foster. In this way, it also has influence in that innocence, when joined with it, knows precisely where to draw the line, where joy turns into excess, courage and decisiveness into violations of others’ rights.

Subjective religion.

If theology is a matter of understanding and memory—its origin may be whatever it is, even from religion itself—while religion is a matter of the heart, interesting to us because of a need of practical reason, then it follows immediately that different faculties of the soul are at work in religion and theology, and that different dispositions of the soul are required for each.

In order to be able to hope that the highest good—which we are commanded to make a real component of our duty—will actually come to pass, practical reason requires belief in a deity, in immortality.

This is at least the seed from which religion springs—and conscience, the inner sense of right and wrong, and the feeling that wrongdoing must be punished and right action rewarded with happiness—this only dissolves the deduction of religion into its component parts, into clear concepts. Whether the idea of a mighty invisible being arose in the human soul from some terrifying natural event, or whether God first revealed himself to humans in the thunderstorm—where one feels his presence more immediately—or in the gentle whisper of the evening breeze, it struck that moral feeling which found in that idea the perfect correspondence to its need.

Religion becomes mere superstition when it is invoked in situations where only prudence should advise; when fear of the deity compels a person to perform certain acts in hopes of averting divine displeasure. In many sensual nations, religion may indeed be of this nature—the concept of God and his manner of dealing with humans is then limited to what accords with the laws of human sensibility, and is effective only on their sensuality—and very little that is moral is mixed into that concept. The notion of God, and the idea of turning to him, is already more moral—that is, it already indicates a consciousness of a higher order governed by greater ends than mere sensuality. Even if the aforementioned superstition is also mixed in, yet when the inquiry into the deity regarding the future or the outcome of an undertaking is also joined with invocation of his help, with the feeling that everything depends on his decisions, and if belief underlies it—or at least stands alongside belief in fate or natural necessity—then there is at least the faith that he dispenses happiness only to the just, and misfortune to the unjust and the arrogant.

And when moral motives for action are drawn from religion, then it becomes genuine.

Subjective religion is essentially the same among good people—no matter what color objective religion may take.

“What makes you a Christian to yourselves, makes you a Jew to me.”

So says Nathan [the Wise], for religion is a matter of the heart, which often acts inconsistently with the dogmas that its intellect or memory accepts. The most venerable human beings are certainly not always those who have speculated the most about religion—those who often transform their religion into theology, i.e., who exchange the fullness and sincerity of faith for cold knowledge and rhetorical display.

Religion gains something from the intellect—but not much. Its operations, its doubts, may even cool the heart more than they warm it. And he who has discovered that the representations of other nations, or of the so-called pagans, contain much absurdity, and who rejoices greatly in his own superior insight, in the reach of his reason—greater than that of the greatest men—that person does not understand the essence of religion.

He who calls his Jehovah “Jupiter” or “Brahma,” and is a true worshipper of God, offers his thanks and his sacrifice just as childlike as the true Christian does. Who is not moved by that beautiful simplicity, when innocence remembers its greatest benefactor in the good that nature offers it, and presents to him the best, the unblemished, the firstfruits of its grain and sheep?

Who does not admire Coriolanus, when in the height of his fortune, fearing Nemesis, just as Gustavus Adolphus in the battle of Lützen humbled himself before God, he prays—not to the genius of Roman greatness—but to be humbled?

Such expressions are meant for the heart and must be enjoyed with the heart, with simplicity of spirit and feeling—not judged with cold intellect. Only the self-conceit of sectarianism, which fancies itself wiser than all people of other factions, could fail to appreciate the pure final will of Socrates—to offer a rooster to the god of healing in gratitude for what he considered a recovery through death—and instead make the spiteful remark that Tertullian offers in Apologeticus 46.

Where the heart, as in the friar in the scene from Nathan the Wise from which the earlier quotation is drawn, does not speak louder than the intellect—where it remains silent and gives the intellect time to reason about an action—there the heart is already not worth much; love does not dwell there. Nowhere is the voice of unspoiled feeling, of a pure heart, and the pedantry of the intellect more beautifully opposed than in the Gospel story where Jesus accepts the anointing of his body by a woman formerly of ill repute as the open, uninhibited outpouring of a soul filled with repentance, trust, and love, undeterred by the surrounding company. He accepts it with favor and affection. But some of his apostles had hearts too cold to perceive the depth of this feminine feeling, to share in the beauty of this act of trust, and were able to dress their callous remark in the guise of charitable concern. What a barren and forced comment it is when the well-meaning Gellert says somewhere that a little child today knows more of God than the wisest pagan—just like Tertullian in Apologeticus 46: “deum quilibet opifex…” (every craftsman knows God). As though the compendium of morality that sits here in my bookshelf—where I alone decide whether to use it to wrap a piece of stinking cheese—had more value than the perhaps sometimes unjust heart of a Frederick II. For the difference between Tertullian’s opifex, the catechism-stuffed child of Gellert, and the paper on which morality is printed is, in this regard, not very great: both lack genuinely acquired, experiential moral consciousness in nearly equal measure.

Enlightenment—reform through intellect.

The intellect serves only objective religion—refining its principles, presenting them in purity. It has borne excellent fruit, such as Lessing’s Nathan, and deserves the praise it constantly receives.

But principles are never made practical through the intellect.

The intellect is a courtier who adjusts himself willingly to his master’s whims. He can find justifications for any passion, for any venture. Above all, he serves self-love, which is always ingenious in giving committed or intended faults a pleasing hue—often even praising itself for having found such a good excuse.

Enlightenment of the intellect may make one cleverer, but not better. Even if one tries to derive virtue from prudence, showing someone that they cannot attain happiness without virtue, the calculation remains far too subtle, too cold, to have real effect in the moment of action—or to influence life at all.

Whoever takes the best manual of morals, familiarizes themselves with both the general principles and the specific duties and virtues, and then attempts to apply them in action—such a person, if they tried to think through this heap of rules and exceptions before acting, would end up with a behavior so entangled, so perpetually anxious and self-contradictory, that it would be paralyzing. No moralist ever wrote a book expecting there to be a person who would memorize it and consult it every time they felt a desire—checking to see if it were moral or permitted. And yet that is, strictly speaking, the demand that morality places on a person: that no bad inclination even arise, that it never reaches a certain intensity. But no printed morality, no enlightenment of the intellect can achieve this.

This is the negative critique raised in Campe’s Theophron—the human being must act for themselves, must make their own decisions, must not let others act in their stead. Otherwise, they are nothing more than a mechanical device.

When we speak of “enlightening a people,” it presupposes that error prevails among them—popular prejudices, especially those tied to religion, which are the most persistent. These are usually grounded in sensuality, in blind expectation that an effect will follow which is wholly unconnected to the supposed cause.

In a people ruled by prejudice, the concept of causality often rests on mere succession—things are taken to be causes simply because they follow each other. Even where causes are spoken of, the intervening links in a chain of consequences are frequently omitted or not understood. Sensuality and imagination are the primary sources of prejudice. Even propositions that are objectively true—ones that would hold up under rational scrutiny—are still prejudices for the common folk insofar as they believe them without knowing the reasons why.

So prejudices may be of two kinds: (a) genuine falsehoods; or (b) genuine truths, which are not recognized as truths through reason, but rather are accepted on faith. In this latter case, no subjective merit accrues.

To “enlighten” the people, then—especially in regard to practical prejudices, those that influence the will—is not about stripping away all prejudices indiscriminately. Rather, it means cultivating the understanding with respect to certain matters so that it may (a) free itself from the coercive power of falsehoods and (b) be genuinely convinced of the truth by reasoned grounds.

But to begin with: who among mortals has the right to decide what truth is?

Still, for practical purposes—for the sake of civil society—we must assume certain common principles to be universally valid. They must be self-evident to sound human reason, and must also lie at the foundation of any religion worthy of the name—no matter how distorted that religion might be. (a) These core principles are few in number, and (b) precisely because they are so abstract and universal—or, if they are to be rendered in the clarity that reason demands, because they contradict experience and sensory appearance (which they are not meant to regulate, but only to correct)—they are not easily embraced as living convictions by the people. And even if memory retains them, they still form no part of the human being’s real structure of desire and motivation.

Furthermore: since it is impossible for a religion meant for the people to be composed purely of such abstract truths—truths that only a few exceptional individuals in each era have fully grasped and loved—it follows that additions must always be mixed in, which are accepted solely on trust and belief. Or the purer principles must be clothed in more sensual forms to be understood and found agreeable by the senses. And in addition, customs must be introduced whose necessity or benefit must be accepted either through heartfelt faith or lifelong habituation.

From this it follows clearly: popular religion, and indeed religion itself, insofar as it is to be effective in life and action, cannot be founded on pure reason alone.

Positive religion necessarily rests on faith in tradition—through which it has been transmitted to us. And thus, we can speak of the binding nature of its religious practices only on the basis of the belief that God regards them as pleasing, as duties he demands from us. But if I consider them purely from the standpoint of reason, I can say of them only that they serve for edification, for the awakening of pious feelings, and that their suitability for that end may be examined.

But as soon as I am convinced that God is not honored in himself by these practices, that righteous action is the most pleasing service to him—yet I still recognize that these practices serve edification—then precisely for that reason, these practices will have lost a great part of their possible impression on me.

As religion, in general, is a matter of the heart, one could ask to what extent reasoning may interfere and still remain religion. When one reflects too much on the origin of feelings, on the customs one is expected to participate in and through which pious sentiments are to be awakened—on their historical origin, on their appropriateness and similar things—then they surely lose some of the sacred aura with which we were once accustomed to behold them, just as the dogmas of theology lose their authority when we examine them through the lens of church history.

But how little such cold reflection offers true support to a person is seen all too often, when someone finds themselves in a situation where the torn heart needs a firmer staff to lean on—when despair again grasps at that which once offered comfort, and now clings to it all the more anxiously, lest it slip away again, while the ear deliberately shuts itself against the sophistries of the intellect.

Something other than enlightenment, other than reasoning, is wisdom—but wisdom is not science. Wisdom is an elevation of the soul that has, through experience combined with reflection, risen above the sway of opinion and the impressions of sensuality. And if it is practical wisdom—not mere self-satisfied or boastful wisdom—it must necessarily be accompanied by a quiet warmth, a gentle fire. It reasons little. It does not proceed methodically from definitions and a chain of syllogisms in barbara et barocco to what it holds to be true. It did not purchase its conviction in the public market, where knowledge is sold to anyone who pays the price, nor could it count out its truth in coined currency, in the circulating denominations of the schools. Rather, it speaks from the fullness of the heart.

The cultivation of understanding and its application to objects of interest—that remains a noble privilege. As does clarity about one’s duties, enlightenment concerning practical truths. But these are not of such a kind that they can give morality to a person. In worth, they stand infinitely behind goodness and purity of heart; indeed, they are not even commensurable with them.

Cheerfulness is a defining trait in the character of a well-disposed youth. If circumstances hinder it—if he must withdraw more into himself—and he resolves to form himself into a virtuous man, but does not yet have sufficient experience to know that books cannot accomplish this alone, then he may reach for Campe’s Theophron, hoping to make these lessons in wisdom and prudence his guide in life. He reads a section every morning and evening and thinks about it all day long. What will be the result? Actual self-improvement? That would require years of practice and experience.

But the meditations on Campe and his pedagogical ruler will grow tiresome in eight days! He moves about gloomy and anxious in society, where only those are welcome who know how to cheer others. He experiences joy timidly, joy which is only truly savored by those whose hearts are already cheerful. Overwhelmed by the sense of his own shortcomings, he bows awkwardly before everyone. Social interaction with women does not lift his spirits, because he fears that a mere touch from a young girl might ignite a burning flame through his veins—and this gives him an awkward, stiff demeanor. But he won’t endure this for long; he will soon shake off the supervision of this grumpy tutor and be all the better for it.

If Enlightenment is to achieve what its greatest proponents claim for it—if it is to deserve its accolades—then it must become true wisdom. Otherwise, it remains nothing more than pseudo-wisdom (afterweisheit), which boasts and exalts itself in its lumières, imagining itself far superior to its many weaker brethren. This conceit is common among many young men who, through books, acquire new insights and begin to abandon the beliefs they had shared with most around them—often with vanity playing a particularly large role. Whoever speaks much of the incomprehensible stupidity of humankind, who can demonstrate to the hair’s breadth how foolish it is that a people should hold a certain prejudice, who constantly throws around terms like “Enlightenment,” “knowledge of mankind,” “history of humanity,” “happiness,” and “perfection”—he is nothing but a mountebank of Enlightenment, a street vendor hawking bland universal remedies.

They feed each other hollow words and overlook the sacred, delicate fabric of human feeling. Each of us likely hears such chatter around us; many may well have experienced it in themselves. For in our age, so crammed with books, this developmental trajectory is quite common. If now and then, through life itself, someone learns to truly understand what had previously lain dormant in their soul as dead capital, yet still a mass of undigested book-learning remains in their intellectual stomach—a mass which, because the stomach is overburdened, prevents healthier nourishment from being digested, and deprives the rest of the system of any truly sustaining juices—then the bloated appearance may perhaps give the illusion of health, but a bloodless phlegm paralyzes all free movement in the limbs.

A task of the enlightening intellect is to examine objective religion. But just as intellect has little weight when it comes to actually improving people—raising them to great, resolute convictions, to noble feelings, to determined self-reliance—so too its product, objective religion, carries little weight in this regard.

It flatters the human intellect to behold its own creation—a vast and lofty edifice of the knowledge of God, of human duties, and of nature. Indeed, it has assembled the tools and materials for it; it has fashioned from them a building and continually labors to refine it—sometimes embellishing it with ornamentation. Yet the more expansive and complex the construction becomes—a building on which all humanity labors—the less does it belong to any one individual.

He who merely copies this general edifice, who gathers only from it, who does not build for himself and from himself a little house of his own to dwell in—with rafters and framework in which he feels at home, where every stone, if not wholly hewn by him from raw form, was at least shaped and turned in his hands—he is a man of letters only, not one who has lived and woven from within.

Whoever merely constructs a palace after the pattern of that great house lives in it like Louis XIV in Versailles—hardly familiar with all the rooms of his own property—and occupies only a tiny cabinet within it. But a father in his ancestral home knows everything better; he can give an account of every screw and every cupboard, of its use and its history. (Compare: Lessing’s Nathan — “Of most things I can still say where, how, and why I learned them.”)

The little house that a man can call truly his own—that is what religion must help to build. And how much it can help him in doing so!

Between pure religion of reason, which worships God in spirit and in truth and sees His service only in virtue, and fetish-belief, which imagines that it can make itself pleasing to God through something other than a genuinely good will—there lies so vast a difference that the latter, in contrast to the former, has no value at all; both are of entirely different kinds. And as important as it is for humanity to be led ever more toward religion of reason and for fetish-belief to be displaced, the question remains:

Since a purely spiritual church remains only an ideal of reason—and since it is hardly possible to establish a public religion that removes all opportunity for deriving fetish-belief from it—how must a popular religion be generally organized so that:

a) Negatively, it gives as little occasion as possible for people to cling to the letter and to external practices, and

b) Positively, that the people be led toward religion of reason and become receptive to it?

If in morality the idea of holiness is posited as the highest peak of virtue and as the ultimate goal of striving, then the objections of those who say such an idea is unreachable for man (which even those moralists themselves admit), and that, beyond pure reverence for the law, man still needs other motives related to his sensuous nature, prove not so much that man should not strive toward this idea—were it even for eternity—but rather only that, given the coarseness and powerful inclination toward sensuality among most people, one must often be content with merely achieving legality—and legality requires no purely moral motivation, for which they have little sensitivity.

And it is already a gain if only crude sensuality is refined, and if instead of truly animal impulses, there emerge feelings that are more susceptible to the influence of reason and come somewhat closer to the moral—where it is only possible for moral sentiments to germinate if the loud clamoring of sensuality has been somewhat quieted. Indeed, even mere culture is already a gain. They wish only to assert that it is unlikely—either for mankind as a whole or for any individual—that humanity could ever entirely dispense with non-moral impulses.

Such feelings are woven into our very nature—feelings which, though not moral, not springing from reverence for the law, and thus neither entirely firm nor possessing inherent worth or deserving of reverence—are nevertheless lovable, inhibit evil inclinations, and promote the best in humanity. These include all benevolent tendencies: compassion, goodwill, friendship, etc.

To this empirical character, which is enclosed within the circle of inclinations, belongs also the moral feeling, which must extend its delicate threads into the entire fabric of being. The foundational principle of the empirical character is love, which is something analogous to reason in that love finds itself in others—or rather, forgetting itself, it places itself outside its own existence, lives, feels, and acts, so to speak, in others. In the same way, reason, as the principle of universally valid laws, recognizes itself in every rational being as a fellow-citizen of an intelligible world.

The empirical character of man is indeed affected by pleasure and displeasure. Yet love, even if it is a pathological principle of action, is unselfish. It acts not because it has calculated that the pleasures resulting from its actions will be purer and longer-lasting than those of sensuality or from satisfying some passion. Thus, it is not the principle of refined self-love, in which the I is always the ultimate end.

Empiricism is certainly unsuited for the formulation of fundamental principles. But when it comes to the question of how to influence people, one must take them as they are, and seek out all good impulses and emotions by which, even if not directly their freedom is increased, yet their nature may be ennobled. Especially in a popular religion, it is of the greatest importance that imagination and the heart not remain unsatisfied—that the former be filled with grand and pure images, and that in the latter the most beneficent feelings be awakened. That both are given a proper direction is all the more essential in religion, whose subject is so great, so sublime, where both are all too easily left to forge their own paths or be led astray—either the heart clinging to externals through false representations and its own comfort-seeking nature, or finding nourishment in lowly, falsely humble feelings, while believing it is serving God thereby.

Or the imagination may associate things as causes and effects whose sequence is purely coincidental, and expect extraordinary effects contrary to nature. Man is such a multifaceted being that anything can be made of him; the intricately interwoven fabric of his emotions has so many loose ends that, if not through one thread, then through another, it can be seized—hence he has been capable of the most foolish superstition, of the greatest hierarchical and political servitude. To weave these fine natural threads into a noble band must be above all the task of popular religion.

Popular religion differs from private religion primarily in this: its purpose—by working powerfully on imagination and heart—is to inspire the soul with the strength and enthusiasm, the spirit, indispensable for great and noble virtue. The development of the individual according to his character, instruction in resolving conflicts of duty, particular means of promoting virtue, comfort and support in moments of suffering and misfortune—these belong to private religious education. And that they do not qualify for public religion is evident:

a) Instruction regarding conflicts of duty—these are so manifold that one can be guided only either by the counsel of upright and experienced men, or by the conviction that duty and virtue are the highest principles—convictions that may indeed have been instilled and solidified through public religion and made maxims of action. Yet public instruction—like moral instruction, as already noted—is too dry, and no more than that can it succeed in ensuring that, in the moment of action, the mind be guided by such subtle casuistic rules. On the contrary, it would tend to generate an endless scrupulosity that stands in stark opposition to the determination and strength required for virtue.

b) If virtue is not a product of teaching and chatter, but rather a plant which—though requiring proper cultivation—nonetheless grows from its own impulse and strength, then the many artifices devised to cultivate virtue as in a greenhouse, where nothing can be left to chance, do more to harm than to help. Religious public instruction by its very nature entails not only that the understanding be enlightened concerning the idea of God and our relation to Him, but also that one attempt to derive all other duties from the obligations we supposedly have toward God—and to impress them upon us all the more strongly by presenting them as all the more binding.

However, this derivation has something contrived about it, something artificially deduced. It establishes a connection that is evident only to the understanding, often highly artificial and at the very least not convincing to common sense. And typically, the more motives one adduces for a duty, the colder one becomes toward it.

c) The only true comfort in suffering (for pain there is no comfort—only strength of soul can oppose it) is trust in God’s providence. All else is empty talk that slides off the heart.

How must popular religion be constituted? (Here popular religion is taken in the objective sense.)

a) With regard to its objective doctrines
b) With regard to its ceremonies

A:
I. Its doctrines must be grounded in universal reason.
II. Imagination, heart, and sense must not be left unfulfilled.
III. It must be constituted such that all needs of life—including public, state-level actions—can be connected to it.

B:
What must it avoid?
Fetish-belief—above all that which is widespread in our verbose age: the illusion that one has satisfied reason’s demands merely by delivering tirades about Enlightenment, etc.; or that one can argue endlessly over dogmatic doctrines while meanwhile improving neither oneself nor others.

I. The doctrines must necessarily—even if their authority is grounded in divine revelation—be such that they are, in principle, authorized by universal human reason. Their obligation must be immediately comprehensible and palpable to every human being who is made attentive to them.

Otherwise, such doctrines—which promise to provide us with special means to gain God’s favor, or to impart special, superior knowledge, or closer insight into inaccessible subjects supposedly for the benefit of reason, not merely for fantasy—will sooner or later become the target of attack by thinking individuals and the subject of unending controversy. In such disputes, practical interest is always lost. Or, to prevent the controversy, rigid and intolerant creeds are established. And because their connection to the genuine needs and demands of reason remains unnatural—and if, nonetheless, this connection becomes firm through habit—they easily give rise to abuse. They will never, in the soul, attain the weight of a pure, genuine, morally grounded practical moment.

These doctrines must also be simple—and if they are truths of reason, then they are for that very reason simple, because they then require neither scholarly apparatus nor the laborious effort of complex proofs. And it is precisely through this quality of simplicity that they exert all the more force and emphasis upon the soul, upon the determination of the will toward action—and thus, they concentrate far more influence, far more participation in shaping the spirit of a people, than when commandments are accumulated, artificially ordered, and for that very reason always require many exceptions.

These general doctrines must simultaneously be human—a great and difficult demand—and indeed, so human that they are appropriate to the level of intellectual culture and the stage of morality at which a people stands. Precisely some of the loftiest and most profoundly moving ideas for humanity are perhaps least suited to be taken up as general maxims; they seem to belong solely to a few individuals, tested through long experience and advanced to wisdom—individuals for whom they have become firm beliefs, unshakable convictions, especially in those situations where they are meant to bring consolation. Of this kind, in particular, is belief in a wise and benevolent Providence, accompanied—if it is of the right kind and alive—by complete surrender to God.

This doctrine, as much as it and everything associated with it is a central doctrine in the Christian churches, insofar as everything presented therein is reduced to the inaccessible love of God, toward which all things tend—further, since we are presented year in, year out with God as ever-present, ever-near, effecting everything around us—as strongly as all this is not only presented as being necessarily connected with our morality and that which is holiest to us, but also elevated to the fullest certainty through frequent affirmations from God Himself, and through other facts meant to convince us incontrovertibly—yet in practice, we see in the masses that a thunderclap, a cold night, is sufficient to make them faint-hearted in their trust in Providence and in the patient resignation to God’s will that ought to follow from it.

Indeed, it seems that such trust and patience is the portion only of a wise man—only he can rise above impatience, irritation at disappointed hopes, and bitterness in the face of misfortune. That sudden collapse of trust in God, the swift turn toward discontent with Him, is made all the easier because the Christian masses have not only from youth been trained to pray unceasingly, but are also continually persuaded of the absolute necessity of prayer by being promised its fulfillment.

Furthermore, for the benefit of suffering humanity, an enormous store of consolations in misfortune has been gathered from every end and corner—so much so that one could almost regret not losing a father or mother every eight days, or not being struck blind. This method of reflection has become so overdeveloped that with incredible subtlety the physical and moral effects of suffering have been traced out and dissected—and by presenting these effects as the purposes of Providence, people have come to believe they have attained more intimate insights into its plans for humanity, not merely in general but even in specific instances.

Yet as soon as we fail to rest content in this matter—fail to place our fingers upon our lips in reverent silence—it is only too common for presumptuous curiosity to step in, claiming mastery over the ways of Providence. This tendency, to be sure, is not further reinforced among the general populace by the many idealistic ideas currently in fashion. But all of this contributes very little to the cultivation of surrender to God’s will or to the promotion of genuine contentment.

It would be most interesting to compare this with the religion of the Greeks. Among them, on the one hand, there was the belief that the gods favored the righteous and handed over evil to the dreadful Nemesis—a belief grounded in the deep moral need of reason, delightfully animated by the warm breath of feeling—not in the cold conviction, deduced from individual cases, that all turns to the best, which can never truly be brought into life.

On the other hand, misfortune was for them truly misfortune, pain was truly pain. What had happened and could not be changed—they did not speculate about its meaning, for their moîra, their anankē tychnē (blind necessity), was indeed blind. But to this necessity they submitted willingly, with all possible resignation, and thereby had at least the advantage that one endures more easily what one has from youth been accustomed to regard as necessary—and that misfortune, beyond the pain and suffering it brings, does not also give rise to the far more burdensome and unbearable additions of bitterness, gloom, and discontent.

This belief—since it includes both reverence for the current of natural necessity and, at the same time, the conviction that human beings are governed by the gods according to moral laws—appears to be humanly appropriate to both the sublimity of divinity and the weakness, dependency on nature, and limited horizon of the human being.

Simple doctrines grounded in universal reason are compatible with any level of popular education, and this education will gradually modify them as it develops, though more externally—more in terms of the pictorial elements that pertain to sensory imagination.

These doctrines, if they are truly founded upon universal human reason, can, by their very nature, have no other purpose than to exert influence, both directly and through the magical power of deeply penetrating ceremonies, upon the spirit of the people as a whole—such that they neither interfere in the administration of civil justice, nor presume to impose private censorship. And since their formulas are also simple, they will give little cause for dispute, and because they require and posit little that is positive, their formulation of the laws of reason remains merely formal—thus the authoritarianism of priests in such a religion is inherently limited.

II. Every religion that is to be a public religion must necessarily be structured in such a way that it engages both the heart and the imagination. Even the purest religion of reason becomes incarnate in the souls of people—still more so among the general population—and it might indeed be beneficial, in order to forestall extravagant excesses of imagination, to already bind mythology to religion itself, so as to offer the imagination at least a beautiful path, one which it might then adorn with flowers.

The doctrines of the Christian religion are, for the most part, connected with history or are represented through it, and the stage upon which they are enacted is the Earth—even if not merely humans are the actors. Here, then, the imagination is offered a clearly recognizable goal—but still, many places remain where it is left a free and open field, and if tinged with dark bile, it may conjure up a terrifying world. On the other hand, it is also prone to fall into childishness, since the gentle, sensuous colors drawn from nature are excluded by the spirit of our religion—and we, generally being overly rationalistic and word-minded, do not love beautiful images.

As for ceremonies, on the one hand, it is almost inconceivable that a public religion could exist without them; but on the other hand, there is scarcely anything more difficult than to prevent the common people from mistaking them for the essence of religion itself.

Religion consists of three elements:
a) concepts,
b) essential practices, and
c) ceremonies.

If we regard baptism and the Lord’s Supper as rituals to which certain extraordinary blessings and acts of grace are attached, which are imposed upon us as duties in themselves, whose performance renders us more perfect and moral in and of themselves, then they belong to the second category. But if we regard them merely as means whose purpose and effect is simply to awaken pious sentiments, then they belong to the third category.

Sacrifices also fall under this heading, though they can only be called ceremonies in a figurative sense, because in the religions with which they are associated, they are essential—they belong to the building itself, whereas ceremonies are but its adornment—its external form.

Sacrifices too can be viewed from two perspectives:

a) First, when they were offered to the altars of the gods as atonements, as pardons, as commutations of feared physical or moral punishments into monetary fines, as a means of currying favor with the estranged grace of the Supreme Lord, the dispenser of rewards and punishments. In evaluating the deficiency of such a practice, it is certainly correct to criticize the irrationality and the corruption of the concept of morality that it entails. Yet we must also keep in mind that the idea of sacrifice was never held in so crude a form—except perhaps in the Christian Church!—and that the value of the feelings operative in such contexts—the holy reverence before the sacred being, the humbling surrender and contrition of the heart before it, the trust with which the soul burdened and longing for peace sought refuge in this anchor—must not be entirely disregarded.

A pilgrim, weighed down by the burden of his sins, who leaves behind the comfort of wife and child, forsakes his native soil to traverse the world barefoot and in a rough garment, seeking rugged paths to cause his feet pain, and wets the sacred places with his tears—seeking rest for his battling, tormented spirit, finding relief in every tear shed, in every penance, in every act of self-denial—and who, at the thought “Here Christ walked, here He was crucified for me,” is emboldened, receives strength anew, rediscovers trust in himself—should such a pilgrim, in the simplicity of his heart, become an object of Pharisaical arrogance for one in whom such a religious disposition is no longer possible due to the concepts of his age? Should we, in our superior cleverness, awaken in ourselves the smug thought: I am wiser than such people? Should such holy sentiments become objects of ridicule for us?

Even these penances are a kind of sacrifice of the same sort I have described here—sacrifices stemming from the same spirit as those penitential practices.

b) Another, gentler form of sacrifice, which seems to have arisen in milder climates, is likely the original and more universal one: it is rooted in gratitude and goodwill—where the feeling of a being superior to man, the consciousness that one owes everything to it, and that what one offers it in innocence is not despised; the sentiment of first seeking its blessing at the start of every endeavor—of turning to it in every joy, in every happiness attained—of presenting to it the first fruits, the blossoms of every good, inviting this being to dwell kindly among humans, hoping that it will graciously abide with them. The disposition that offered such a sacrifice was far removed from the idea that something had been expiated, that punishment for sin had been averted, or that Nemesis had been satisfied and had withdrawn her claims and annulled the laws that restore moral equilibrium.

Such essential practices of religion should not, in truth, be more intimately connected with religion itself than with the spirit of the people—and should in fact have sprouted forth from it—otherwise their performance will be lifeless, cold, devoid of power; the sentiments experienced in them will be artificial, pumped up—or they are practices not essential to public religion, though they may be meaningful for private religion—such as the Lord’s Supper in its current form among Christians, even though its original purpose was a meal taken in communal enjoyment.

Necessary properties of the ceremonies of a public religion:

a) And foremost, that they give as little occasion as possible for idolatrous worship (Fetischdienst)—that they are not constructed in such a way that only the mechanical act remains, and the spirit vanishes. Their sole purpose must be to elevate devotion, to heighten sacred sentiments—and as such a pure means, least prone to abuse and most effective in producing this effect, perhaps only sacred music and the communal singing of an entire people remain—perhaps also public festivals, in which religion must take part.

II. As soon as a dividing wall—or even just a gap—between life and doctrine arises, suspicion emerges that the form of the religion is defective—either because it relies too much on word-peddling (Wortkrämerei) or because it makes too lofty and affected demands upon people.

If joy, if human cheerfulness must be ashamed before religion—if someone who has made merry at a public festival must then creep into the temple in secret—then the religion’s outward form is too gloomy to expect that people would surrender life’s pleasures for its demands. Religion must dwell amiably among all the affairs of life—without intruding—but be welcome everywhere. If religion is to influence the people, it must accompany them kindly everywhere—stand at their side in the serious concerns of life as well as in festivals and joys—but not in such a way as to impose itself, or appear as a burdensome governess, but rather as a guide and encourager.

The public festivals of the Greeks were virtually all religious festivals—held in honor of a god or a man who had earned divine honors by serving the state. Even the excesses of the Bacchantes were consecrated to a god—even their public theater had a religious origin, which it never disowned in its later development. Thus Agathon did not forget the gods when he won the prize for his tragedy—on the following day he gave the gods a feast (cf. Symposium, p. 166).

A public religion that produces and nourishes great sentiments walks hand in hand with freedom.

Our religion wants to train men as citizens of heaven, whose gaze is always directed upward—and in doing so, it alienates them from human sentiments. At our greatest public festival, one approaches the enjoyment of the sacred gift clothed in mourning, with downcast gaze—at a feast that ought to be a celebration of universal brotherhood, many fear to drink from the fraternal cup, lest they be infected with venereal disease by the one who drank before them—and so that one’s soul is not distracted from holy sentiments, one must, during the act itself, reach into one’s pocket to retrieve the offering and place it on the plate.

Instead of the Greeks—crowned with the friendly gifts of nature, accompanied by the colors of joy, spreading cheerfulness upon their open, friendly, love-inviting faces—approaching the altars of their kind gods.

The spirit of the people, their history, their religion, and the degree of their political freedom cannot be viewed in isolation from one another, neither in terms of their mutual influence nor of their specific characteristics—they are interwoven into one band, like three colleagues in office, none of whom can do anything without the others, but each of whom also receives something from the others. The morality of individual persons is the domain of private religion—of parents, of one’s own effort and circumstance. The spirit of a people is, in part, the responsibility of public religion and, in part, of political institutions.

The father of this spirit is Chronos, from whom he remains dependent all his life (i.e., the temporal circumstances); his mother is the mole, the constitution; his nurse and wet nurse is religion; his helpers in education are the fine arts—music, the movement of the body and mind. Aetheric in nature, he is tethered to the Earth by a light bond which, enchanted by a magical charm, resists all attempts to break it—for it is wholly entwined in his being. This bond, whose coarse foundation is necessity, is woven from a thousand threads of nature; and in the fact that he becomes more firmly bound to nature with each new thread, he feels not constraint but rather, since it is the work of his own activity, the expansion of his enjoyment, the extension of his life—he finds enlargement, multiplication of these threads as a free self-enlargement.

All the finer, more beautiful feelings have developed in him, which bring myriad variations of joy into experience and sociability. Around him dance cheerfulness and joy, his more serious companions are friendship and love—not the woodland faun, but the mischievous yet tender-souled Amor. This wealth of beautiful sentiments can only be cultivated, only sprout and bloom and ripen slowly like any fruit of nature—and this beautiful son can only be raised if his mother—the nurturing spirit—does not act as a stepmother toward him, if she is not scolding and harsh, but entrusts him to the education of nature as far as possible, which raises every plant best when it is least grafted, least manipulated. (Cf. Longinus, On the Sublime, final section; Plato, Symposium, p. 186.)

As the nurse in Greece remained a house-friend and friend of the child throughout life, so too she remained always his friend, to whom he offered his undiminished thanks, his free love, who shared in his games, whose soul led his own—and who did not disturb his joys. She retained her dignity through it all, and his own conscience punished any neglect of her. She preserved her rule forever, for it was founded upon love, upon gratitude, upon the noblest feelings of her foster son. In her adornment she flattered the whims of his imagination—but she taught him to honor iron necessity, she taught him to follow this unalterable fate without complaint.

We know this spirit only by hearsay—only a few traces of him remain to us in copied outlines of his form, which we are allowed to behold with love and admiration, evoking only a painful longing for the original. He is the beautiful youth, whom we love even in his frivolity, together with the full retinue of the Graces—with them, the balsamic breath of nature, the soul breathed into him by them, which he drew from every flower—he has fled the Earth.

The father of this spirit is Chronos (Time and Circumstance), from whom he remains dependent throughout his life; his mother, in whose womb he is born, is the politeia, the constitution; his wet nurse, his foster mother, is religion, which adopts as assistants in his upbringing the fine arts, music, and the harmonious movement of body and spirit. Aetheric in essence, he is drawn gently toward the earth by a light bond—a magical force that resists all attempts to sever it, for it is wholly woven into his being. This bond, whose coarse foundation is necessity, is interlaced with a thousand threads of nature; and in binding himself more firmly with each new thread, he feels not constraint but rather, since it is the product of his own activity, the expansion of his enjoyment, the extension of his life in this voluntary enlargement and multiplication of the threads.

All the nobler, more refined sentiments have developed within him, bringing myriad variations of pleasure into experience and interaction. Around him dance joy and gladness; his more serious companions are friendship and love—not the woodland faun, but the mischievous, sensitive, soulful Amor. This wealth of beautiful feeling can only be cultivated, can only sprout, blossom, and ripen slowly, like every fruit of nature. And this beautiful son can only be raised if his mother—the nurturing power—does not treat him like a stepmother; if she is neither scolding nor harsh, but instead entrusts him as far as possible to the education of nature, which cultivates every plant best the less it is grafted, the less it is artificially manipulated (cf. Longinus, On the Sublime, final section; Plato, Symposium, p. 186).

As the nurse in ancient Greece remained a lifelong companion and friend of the child, so too did she remain always his friend, to whom he, unspoiled, offers free gratitude and unforced love, sharing his joys and games with her. She is the soul that leads him, and in his joys he is not disturbed by her presence. She maintains her dignity throughout, and his own conscience punishes any neglect toward her. She retains her rule forever, for it is built on love, gratitude, and the noblest feelings of her ward. In her adornments, she flatters the whims of his imagination, but she teaches him to honor iron necessity and to follow this unchangeable fate without complaint.

We know this spirit only by hearsay—only a few traces of him remain to us in copied outlines of his form, which we are permitted to view with love and admiration, awakening only a painful longing for the original. He is the beautiful youth whom we love even in his frivolity, accompanied by the entire train of the Graces, with them the balsamic breath of nature—the soul they breathe into him, which he drew from every flower—he has fled the Earth.

(The West has brought forth another genius of nations—his form is aged—he was never beautiful, but a few faint traces of manliness still remain. His neck is bent; he dares not lift it, neither to cast a joyful gaze upon the world nor to rise up in the feeling of himself. He is short-sighted and can see only small objects at a time; without courage, without trust in his strength, he attempts no bold leap. Iron chains bind him, though the Graces entwine them with roses—and in the end, the coarse threads of the foundation become so refined, so manifoldly intertwined, that the additions can no longer be separated from them. Around him dance…)

(From here the text resumes as previously rendered.)

If the father of this spirit is fortunate, manages his affairs well, and can provide his son with a secure livelihood—not one of too much ease, but also not of hardship—if the mother is not obstinate in wrapping his delicate limbs in swaddling clothes, not capricious in her treatment of him, then the wet nurse—the governess—must also not raise this child of nature with threats of the rod (of Hell and of a stern ruler), nor with the sugar bread of mysticism, which sours the stomach and rots the teeth, nor by the reins of empty words. She must not seek to shape him into a youth through such means, but instead let him act early of his own accord; as a social friend she should share in his joys and games, be his soul’s leader, so that he believes he can only half enjoy anything without her presence, and practice gratitude toward her as the most joyful and beautiful of duties. (Marginal note: The nurse was in Greece a household friend and lifelong companion of the child.)

Ah! From the distant days of the past, a vision shines forth to the soul that feels for human beauty and greatness in their grandeur—the image of a genius of peoples, a son of happiness, of freedom, a ward of beautiful imagination. He too was bound by the iron band of necessity to Mother Earth, but he refined and adorned it through his sentiments, through his imagination, with the help of the Graces, winding it with roses so that it appeared entirely his own work. His servants were joy, cheerfulness, and grace; his soul was filled with the consciousness of its power and freedom; his more serious companions were friendship and love—not the woodland faun, but the sensitive, soulful Amor, adorned with all the charms of the heart and lovely dreams.

From his father, a favorite of fortune and a son of strength, he inherited confidence in his luck and pride in his deeds. His lenient mother, not a scolding, harsh woman, entrusted her son to the education of nature, did not force his tender limbs into confining swaddling, and, as a good mother, followed more the whims and inspirations of her favorite than that she restricted them. In harmony with this, the child of nature was not to be raised by the wet nurse with fear of the rod or with a specter of darkness, nor with the sweet-sour sugar bread of mysticism that slackens the stomach, nor with the leading-strings of words that would have kept him in eternal minority. Rather, she nourished him with the pure, wholesome milk of true feeling. At the hand of beautiful and free imagination, she adorned with flowers the impenetrable veil that conceals the deity from our eyes, populating and enchanting the space behind it with living images upon which he projected the great ideas of his own heart, with the full richness of elevated and beautiful emotion.

Apart from oral instruction…

Apart from oral instruction—which always has a very limited sphere of influence, extending only to those whom nature has placed in close proximity to us—the only truly wide-reaching mode of effect is through writing. Here the teacher places himself upon an invisible pulpit before the entire public; and because he cannot be seen, he is able to address their hearts more directly, to present the most vivid images of their moral corruption, treating them with a severity that he would scarcely use with even the most despised individual in person. Rarely, if ever, has one seen a moralist—when not acting in an official capacity—who had the courage, driven purely by an inner vocation to improve humanity, to say even half of what he dares to proclaim to an entire, socially and officially honored audience. And yet he often derives these depictions precisely from the very people he is addressing—unless, of course, his portrayals are mere ranting, and his remedies mere theoretical quackery.

In general, the method of instruction must conform to the spirit and tone that a given people will respond to. Thus we find the mode of delivery differing across contexts. Socrates, living in a republican state where each citizen spoke freely with the other—and where even the lowest classes participated in a refined civic urbanity—would climb, in the most casual way imaginable, onto the roofs of their minds through conversation. Without adopting a didactic tone or even appearing to instruct, he began with everyday discourse and, with great subtlety, led it to a conclusion that revealed a teaching which presented itself as self-evident and which not even a Diotima could have found intrusive.

The Jews, by contrast, were already accustomed—from their forefathers and their national poets—to being addressed in a harsher tone. From their synagogues onward, their ears had grown attuned to moral preaching and to direct modes of instruction, and to the rough style of argumentation used by scribes and Pharisees. They were therefore used to a combative style of address—and so, a speech beginning with “You brood of vipers and serpents!” did not strike them as harshly as it would have offended Greek ears.

One might think that a person, even with the best natural endowments and most excellent upbringing, should never cease throughout their life to strive for intellectual and moral perfection. An open-minded and active man, placed in various relations—whether by chance or his own initiative—should always have something to learn, and should never think himself finished or perfected. This is all the more true in the complex circumstances of our civil life, where even the most righteous conscience may find itself caught in ambiguous collisions of duty—such as frequent conflicts between individual fairness and compassion on one hand, and general principles of justice or established rights on the other.

In such conditions, prudence must all the more be exercised as a duty, especially when one is not merely attending to one’s own affairs, but is helping to promote the welfare of many others, whether on a large or small scale. This is why many a conscientious Nathanael, unwilling to do violence to his conscience or to spare himself difficult entanglements, has preferred to remove himself entirely from such relations. For the more complex the relations, the more complex the duties; the simpler the one, the simpler the other. And it usually requires more effort to withdraw from a situation than never to enter it—just as it is easier to do without a necessity than to renounce it once embraced.

A Diogenes, then—whose temperament is satisfied with a handful of water and a crust of bread, whose ambition is fulfilled not by purple robes but by a tattered cloak, and who, as neither friend nor father, and through no profession, has significant duties toward others (except not to strike them)—such a man has taken the easy path toward being a morally perfect individual. He may even earn the right to be called a great man and still have time enough to work on improving others.

Among the Romans, no Christ, no Socrates arose. No Roman, in the era of their power, when only one form of virtue was recognized, could have found himself uncertain about what he ought to do—there were only Romans in Rome, not human beings. In contrast, the Greeks cultivated studia humanitatis—humane feelings, human affections, and the arts. Among them, many deviations from natural virtue could be found, which gave Socrates or another wise man grounds for redirection and reflection. To deviate from Roman virtue, however, was a state crime.

Wherever people have fixed one definite model of perfection, and tied virtue to something objective—such that even the passions can be transformed into virtues when serving that goal—it is easier to judge what approaches or diverges from that ideal. But when a higher interest is in play, when duties collide in complex ways, or when natural human inclinations and obligations intensify, then the boundary between virtue and excess—and the extent to which nature should submit to reason—becomes infinitely harder to discern.

Christ had twelve apostles. The number twelve was a fixed and enduring one. He had more disciples, to be sure, but the apostles were those who had access to his most intimate companionship, who had renounced all other ties in order to partake of his teaching and to become, as far as possible, like him in all things. Over time, through instruction and his living example, they sought to possess his spirit. And though, in the beginning, their expectations, hopes, and ideas remained narrowly Jewish and entirely earthly—and though they long looked with heart and mind toward a Messiah who would found a kingdom and distribute positions of power like General and Court Marshal—they could not yet elevate themselves from selfish ambition to the mere honor of becoming fellow citizens in the Kingdom of God.

Christ was not content to have disciples like Nathanael, Joseph of Arimathea, or Nicodemus—that is, men of intellect and noble heart, with whom he merely had thoughtful conversations or in whom he kindled a few new ideas or sparks of inspiration. If the soil in which such sparks fall is not fertile—if it lacks fuel—they are lost.

Such men, living either happily and contentedly in the bosom of their families, or actively and usefully engaged in their spheres of influence, and familiar with the world and its prejudices (and thus tolerant toward it, though strict with themselves), would not have been susceptible to a calling that demanded them to become a kind of adventurer. Christ says: The Kingdom of God does not come with outward signs. It seems, then, that his disciples misunderstood his command, Go into all the world… and baptize them, by interpreting this baptism—an external sign—as universally necessary. But this is all the more harmful because distinguishing people through external signs breeds sectarianism and separation from others.

In general, when a moral distinction is supplemented by another kind of distinction, it is weakened, as though it were already stripped of its proper light. Christ says: Whoever believes… but he does not say: Whoever believes in me. Whether that is to be understood or not, the apostles took it that way. And so the shibboleth of their friends—the citizens of their Kingdom of God—was not virtue or integrity, but Christ, baptism, and so on. Had their Christ not been such a good man—see Nathan—it could have all turned out very differently.

Socrates had students of all kinds—or rather, he had none at all. He was merely a teacher and mentor in the same way that every man distinguished by righteousness and exceptional reason becomes one by his example—even if one never hears him preach from a pulpit or from atop a mountain. How could it even have occurred to a Socrates in Greece to preach? His aim was to instruct people in what should awaken their highest interest, to enlighten them, to vitalize them toward it. He took no payment for his wisdom; nor did he, for its sake, drive away his ill-tempered wife to avoid having to deal with her. Instead, without resistance and without harming his wisdom, he remained in the relationships of husband and father.

The number of his close friends was indeterminate—the thirteenth, the fourteenth, and so on were just as welcome to him as the first, as long as they were his equals in spirit and heart. They were his friends and, to a degree, his students, though each remained who he was: Socrates did not live in them, nor was he their head, from whom they drew the sap of life as limbs from a body. He had no mold into which he sought to cast their characters; no standard by which he aimed to level their differences. That would have suited only small minds, whom he indeed supported, but who were not among his most intimate companions. He had no interest in forming a small corps as his personal guard, all in the same uniform, trained in the same drills, repeating the same slogans, collectively possessing only one spirit—sanded down and smoothed into ideological conformity, and destined to forever bear his name.

Hence there were “Socratics,” but never a guild that could be recognized like masons by hammer and trowel. Each of his students became a master in his own right. Many founded their own schools; several became great generals, statesmen, heroes of every kind—not all of the same mold, but each in his own domain. Not heroes of martyrdom and suffering, but of action and life.

Moreover, whoever had been a fisherman remained one; no one was expected to leave house and home. Socrates began with each man’s trade, and from there led him gently from the hand to the mind—from matters where each felt at home to conversations with him. From the souls of his interlocutors, he brought forth the concepts that were already latent within them, requiring nothing more than a midwife. He gave no cause for anyone to say: “Wait—isn’t that the son of Sophroniscus? Where does he get the wisdom to presume to teach us?” He offended no one through presumptuous airs or self-importance, nor with mysterious, lofty rhetoric that might impress only the ignorant and credulous—among the Greeks, such a man would have been laughed at.

Before his death—and he died as a Greek, sacrificing a rooster to Asclepius, not like Maupertuis in a Capuchin cowl, and not in the fashion you have described—Socrates spoke to his students about the immortality of the soul in the way a Greek speaks to reason and to imagination. He spoke so vividly, and presented this hope through his entire being so intimately and convincingly, that the premises for this postulate had already been gathered by his students over the course of their lives.

This hope—the hope that it contradicts human nature and the faculties of the human spirit that so much would be given to us only for it to be lost, instead of becoming certainty—he enlivened to the point that the human spirit, forgetting its mortal companion, could lift itself out of its confines. So much so that even if a spirit were to rise from its grave and bring us a report from the great avenger beyond, it could tell us nothing more than what is already contained in the tablets of Moses and the oracles of the prophets—that we already carry within our own hearts. And even if such a resurrection did occur, contrary to the laws of human nature, Socrates would not have needed it to strengthen this hope.

Only in paltry souls—in whom the premises for such hope, that is, the idea of virtue and the highest good, are not alive—is the hope for immortality also weak. Socrates left behind no masonic signs, no command to proclaim his name, no method for scaling the soul’s roof and pouring morality into it. The agathon is born with us; it is not something that can be preached. He pointed to no detour leading over himself to train people in the art of goodness; he prescribed no ordo salutis, no spiritual program where every character, class, age, or temperament must pass through fixed stages of suffering or specific inner states.

Rather, he knocked directly at the proper door—without a mediator—and led man only into himself. Not to prepare a home for some foreign guest-spirit arriving from a distant land, but simply to allow more light and space for the old householder already dwelling within, whom the noise of fiddlers and pipers had driven into a forgotten attic room.

It cannot be denied…

It cannot be denied that the Jews held distorted and immoral conceptions of wrath, partiality, hatred toward other nations, and intolerance in their God Jehovah—conceptions which unfortunately passed into both the practice and the theory of the Christian religion, and which have caused too much harm for one not to wish they had originated in a more humane religion or had at least been less adopted by it.

And it is not to their priests, but to philosophy—which for that reason was hated by them—and to the gentler light of our times, that we owe the diminishment of their grim contentiousness, their intolerance, and their pride. As the champions of orthodoxy defended these beliefs against the giants who attacked them, they gradually adopted the views of their adversaries themselves. The only remaining way to preserve the main fortress was to abandon the indefensible outworks—and, so as not to concede anything to the enemy’s honor, to afterwards claim that one had never intended to defend them at all.

Like the general who still held the battlefield at the close of combat, had the triumphal horns of the postillions announce his victory in the capital, and impressed the mob sufficiently for them to intone a thankful Te Deum—yet who later betrays his actual defeat by withdrawing from the region—so too it was not theology that had the final word, but rather the evolving content of their theological compendia, altered within ten or twenty years.

How many things were heresies thirty years ago that no longer are today! (The sentence breaks off.)

“If you want to be perfect, sell what you have and give your possessions to the poor,” said Christ to the young man. This image of perfection, which Christ here presents, contains in itself the clearest proof that his teaching was directed solely toward the cultivation and perfection of the individual—and how little it could be extended to a society at large.

The opponents of Christianity have bitterly emphasized the corruption of Christians, especially the clergy, as evidence against its truth and benevolence. Its defenders consider this the weakest, albeit most dazzling, form of attack. Yet if Christianity is to have any efficacy, its essence should surely be recognizable—namely, moral improvement—especially among those whose profession it is to meditate upon it from youth: mente revolvere.

Their usual excuse is that Christianity has been misunderstood. But they had the Bible just as we do. They suggest it was merely their compendium that was lacking—and had that been correct, everything would have turned out differently. Has Christianity opposed despotism? How long did it take before it opposed the slave trade? Its priests sailed with the ships to Guinea. As for the slave trade: chaplains were sent along. And war? And despotism in every form? The arts of the Enlightenment have improved our morals—yet afterward, it is said that Christianity did this, and that without it, philosophy could not have discovered its own principles.

When reason, drawing on the human spirit and centuries of experience, erects a structure of concepts with self-satisfaction and takes pride in its own work, confronting those who claim a monopoly on truth, showing that it can dispense with their sources—when it is then alleged that theology had already provided the building materials long ago, and knew just as much or more even before those discoveries were made—such a claim is as vain as if a country squire were to boast before Newton that he had seen apples fall from trees since the age of ten and had known since then that the sun does not fall to earth.

Where, before a fortunate shift in the trajectory of scientific culture, has one ever seen a transformation in religious beliefs precede and cause such a shift? Is it not, rather, that the expansion of the sciences and the spirit of inquiry within them has always drawn the clarification of theological concepts after itself—indeed, always under the greatest resistance from the custodians of those concepts?

ON CONSTITUTIONS …

The constitutions, legislation, and religions of nations long retain traces of their original childlike spirit, even when that spirit has long since vanished. For a long time, power remains in the hands of a single person, from whom a family—as from its father—allowed it to be exercised in a childlike manner, even though the people have long ceased to be a family, and the prince a father.

With regard to constitutions and legislation, the nations soon felt—once they had somewhat expanded—that their childlike trust had been abused, and they restricted the arbitrary will of their rulers, whether good or bad, through fixed laws. But the childlike spirit lingered longer in religion, and religion still bears traces of it, even when in the state no one is trusted to do good except insofar as it is permitted or commanded.

This childlike spirit in religion views God as a mighty lord, who moreover has inclinations, passions—even whims—like earthly rulers, and who therefore does not always punish or reward according to the rule of justice. One can flatter him, one devotes to him more reverence than love—just as, in earlier times and still today, princes of the Orient are treated, or as innocence offers gifts to its benefactors and friends, from the good gifts of nature—cheerfulness, contentment—often offering the fairest and earliest as a voluntary tribute of trust and joy.

He is imagined to be nearer here or there, the imagination feels him drawn more readily to linger in some places or people, which therefore seem more sacred, more venerable. To the childlike mind, God appears to act more directly in storms, floods, plagues, in the heaving sea or the threatening cliffs, and the imagination transfers the concerns and relations of human life onto him.

This childlike spirit gave rise to religious institutions, customs, and representations which often appear bizarre and ridiculous to reason, and at times even detestable—most of all when it sees that the lust for domination has deceived the good-hearted through them. Yet to the spirit and imagination, which regress into that earlier sense, they are often charming, sometimes sublime, and even, at the highest level, profoundly moving.

These customs are sanctified by tradition and passed on; the interests of many become so intricately entangled in them that both the greatest degeneration on the one hand, and the progress of reason on the other, are required to cast off such a system—woven into the fabric of general custom—through violent upheaval.

The more the original spirit that once animated these practices fades, the more these sacred customs and rites become a burden—one that genuine piety did not formerly feel—and the more reason gains ground, the nearer these practices come to their downfall.

The religiosity that brings gifts and sacrifices to the temples of the deity—or seeks solace through acts of penance, mortification, fasting, or prolonged, intense prayer—or that indulges in devout feelings of love and mystical emotions—this religiosity becomes incompatible with reason, which demands actions of duty.

As reason advances, many of the sentiments it displaces are lost. Many otherwise moving associations of the imagination grow weaker—associations we call the simplicity of customs—whose images delight and move us, and whose loss we often justly lament.

Traces of it—secret vestiges, where the person who wants to be purely rational is still, as it were, surprised—always remain. Why, even in our own day, are relics of Frederick the Great or of Rousseau eagerly sought and sold at high prices?

These are the traits, for example, that, beyond their bravery and loyalty, make the scenes of the age of chivalry so captivating. The disappearance of such associations is what old age mistakes for the disappearance of morality itself—and is the source of its laments.

When the simplicity of customs still prevails widely in a nation—when things are just as sacred to its princes and priests as they are to the people—there exists no nobler, more beneficent spectacle. That is the happiness of the South Sea islanders, and perhaps it once existed in Peru before the quarrel between Atahualpa and Huáscar.

But when a class—the ruling or the priestly class, or both—loses this spirit of simplicity that once founded and animated its laws and institutions, then not only is that spirit irretrievably lost, but the subjugation, humiliation, and degradation of the people is inevitable.

(Thus the division into estates is dangerous to liberty, for it can give rise to an esprit de corps that soon comes into conflict with the spirit of the whole.)

Even if no more sacrifices or acts of penance are demanded of the people than they were previously accustomed to, the whole is no longer a community that approaches the altars of its gods with unanimous spirit—but rather a mass from whom their leaders extract sacred emotions without themselves sharing them.

It is like the conjurer who elicits admiration from the gawking audience without himself feeling awe—or even pretending to feel it—while others feign sympathy in posture, expression, and words.

This contrast is all the more disturbing to the calm observer the more deeply he is moved by the innocence and simplicity of the crowd: the sight of the devout people, their upward gaze toward heaven, folded hands, bent knees, deep sighs, and burning prayer would irresistibly elevate his heart with pure warmth—were it not for the bitterness stirred in him by the central actors of the drama.

HOW LITTLE OBJECTIVE RELIGION…

How little objective religion in itself, without corresponding institutions of state and government, has achieved—this is demonstrated by its history since the emergence of Christianity. How little has it been able to overcome the corruption of all classes, the barbarism of the times, and the crude prejudices of nations.

Opponents of Christianity—whose hearts were filled with humane sentiment and who read with bleeding hearts the history of the Crusades, the discovery of America, the contemporary slave trade, and not just these spectacular events in which Christianity played a distinguished role—but the entire chain of princely depravity and national depravity—such critics were inevitably filled with a bitterness and hatred toward the Christian religion, which its defenders often attributed to diabolical malice of heart.

To the brilliant and horrifying tableaux of atrocities and misery incited by zeal for one particular religion—images painted with all the force of the brush and all the sharpness of wit by Christianity’s critics—its defenders counter that these weapons are worn out, and that the arguments drawn from them have long since been refuted. Above all, they suggest: all this evil would not have occurred if, to humanity’s good fortune, their catechisms had only been available earlier.

But did the popes and their cardinals, did Kukupeter and the priests of his time—did they not have Moses and the prophets? Could they not hear the same gospel? Did they not have access to the same pure source of morality that we still have today? Did that source really need our paraphrases and academic formulations? Was it, in and of itself, so incomplete—was it not capable, I do not say of improving the morals or restraining the brutality of the people, but at least of exerting a stronger influence on that class of people whose entire profession it was to understand it, and to apply it to themselves?

Was it not capable of moderating the lust for domination among the clergy—who committed either great indecencies or petty basenesses—while donning spiritual humility as a shield, and while finding daily in the teachings of the man to whom they claimed to dedicate their whole lives, the praises and rewards of precisely those virtues they lacked?

Which vice did not flourish among them? And which was not explicitly forbidden by their Lord and Master? Were not the times when princes were led by their confessors—and the lands where clerics held rule—the most miserable?

How easy it is to toss into the balance the entire plan of salvation, along with the most elaborate and scholarly commentaries, and to weigh it against the real-world power of passions, circumstances, education, example, and governance—which launch these into the air far more forcefully.

The intended effect and chief aim of the Christian religion is said to be moral improvement and divine approval. And as the condition under which one can possess the true religion or true faith, it is demanded that one already be either so pleasing to God that He grants one the true faith spontaneously—or so morally upright that one already hates evil and thirsts after righteousness. In other words, one becomes good through the Christian religion—provided one was already good beforehand.

As Montesquieu wrote (L. 24, ch. 2):

“It is bad reasoning against religion to gather, in a great work, a long list of the evils it has produced, without also producing a similar list of the good it has done. If I wanted to recount all the evils produced in the world by civil laws, monarchy, and republican government, I would say terrifying things.”

Among the commandments Christ gave to his disciples and listeners, there are many whose application—if carried out not in the spirit of virtue but merely in the letter—would be either useless or even harmful.

Just as a legal code is incomplete and inapplicable in a society where morals prevail over law, for another society where everything not forbidden by law is permitted—so too many of Christ’s commandments are incompatible with the foundational laws of civil society, the principles of property rights, self-defense, and so on.

A state that would introduce Christ’s commandments as its constitution today could only do so in their external form, for the spirit of these commandments is not something that can be commanded—and it would soon dissolve itself.

One has never heard of a man whose coat was stolen, who still had his vest and trousers left, being rebuked by a Christian teacher for not handing those over as well.

Even with the oath—which the clergy certainly know Christ explicitly forbade—the clergy still play the most solemn part in its performance.

What particularly aroused the hatred of the scribes and the ritualists among the Jews toward Christ? Was it not his individual manner, both in his own actions and in his judgments of others’ actions—actions that not only violated their sacred customs but also transgressed civil laws?

When matters of legal judgment arose, Christ attacked the administrators of these laws—and even if those administrators had been the most blameless men and fully aligned with his spirit, they would nonetheless have had to judge not by that spirit, but according to the law.

The judge must often speak differently than the man; the former must often condemn what the latter would excuse.

From all of this it becomes clear that the teachings of Jesus, his fundamental principles, were truly intended only for the cultivation of individuals—as when he tells the young man who asks him, “Master, what must I do to be perfect?” to sell all he has and give it to the poor.

If this instruction were taken as a principle and implemented even in a small community or village, it would soon lead to consequences so absurd that no one would dream of applying it to an entire people.

And even if a community—like the first Christians—were to adopt this principle of communal property while living amidst another nation, the very moment of its institutionalization would see the spirit of such a commandment already vanish. That spirit, which renders such resignation benevolent, would shrink its effects to its members alone—to those who share its rites and marks of distinction—and thereby contradict the spirit of universal human love, which pours its blessings upon circumcised and uncircumcised, baptized and unbaptized alike.

Public Authority…

Public authority, which presumes to penetrate into the sanctuary of the heart—where only a friend is freely admitted—proceeds to fabricate explanations of intentions, assembled from circumstantial speculation.

The presumption to examine hearts and kidneys, to judge and punish consciences, crept in gradually, and could easily do so, since its seed was already contained in the very origin of Christianity—when that which concerned only a small household was falsely extended to civil society at large. This presumption, which established itself in an almost unbelievable way—for it should seem incredible that people would forget their rights so far and feel so little the loss—has led to the most revolting excesses in violent institutions and the stupefaction of humanity.

Auricular confession, excommunication, penances, and the entire chain of these degrading instruments of human abasement—introduced by the idea of humiliation—these were made possible by that claim. The Reformers, who in their doctrines cited the pronouncements of the New Testament, and in their ecclesiastical police ordinances—because without such they believed the practice of religion could not occur—failed to think of establishing ecclesiastical authority as a counterweight to princely power in support of freedom of conscience. Rather, they subjected Christianity to secular power.

In their church ordinances they wished to follow the simplicity of the early Church, but this led them to overlook the difference between necessary arrangements for a dominant popular religion and the private rules of a partial association, a club. How could they have torn themselves away from the idea of the Church as a kind of status in statu, a visible, uniform community bound together by a defined ritus?

How far, for instance, Luther was removed from the idea of worshiping God in spirit and in truth is shown by his dismal disputes with Zwingli, Oecolampadius, and others. He deprived the clergy of their power to rule through coercion and money, but still wished to dominate over opinions. Princes, together with their court preachers, as guardians of their people, gave their children tutors—who were to guide, admonish, and, in case of need, even discipline them with the rod.

From this came ecclesiastical punishments in addition to political ones, church penances and the like; thus, confession was retained—the actual auricular confession abolished—but clergy were still maintained as confessors, to assist troubled consciences which they themselves continually agitated and made anxious.

This occurred by reducing religion to a matter of heart-improvement, repentance, and conversion—but then not resting in these general terms, which in every human heart signify something different depending on temperament, inclination, and imagination—but analyzing these conditions, indulging in the machinery of feelings, and representing such states as something tangible and sensible, such that their arrival or presence could supposedly be known as easily as reading twelve o’clock on a clock.

They produced detailed psychological descriptions of these states, as if they were identical for all people—descriptions based not on any real knowledge of the human heart, but on theological prejudices about an innate depravity of human nature, assembled artificially by a ridiculous exegesis lacking all knowledge of humanity, and arranged in sequence. All of this was then relentlessly drummed or trifled into the memory and conscience of common people.

The result had to be that such sour leaven necessarily corrupted their healthy, vigorous, active juices. Innumerable misunderstandings arose between their own inclinations and movements; an anxious, disorganized conscience took the place of fullness of feeling, of action, of confidence in oneself, of self-respect—and in its place came insipid sentimentality, undigested verbiage, hypocritical humility, spiritual vanity always preoccupied with itself and its own movements, constantly chattering about its feelings, devotions, and temptations.

At this point, the clergy certainly had their hands full—disentangling doubts, strengthening against temptations, warning of secret demonic influences, comforting in sufferings brought on by the world, the temptations of Satan, and one’s own evil desires and lusts. These are patients who can no longer bear healthy air or fresh water, but must now live on insipid broths and apothecary mixtures, keeping a diary of every wind pressing their intestines, every sneeze and cough—and having no more to do with anyone but themselves—perhaps offering their teas to some supplicant and commending him to the care of God.

One sees this clearly in the theological compendia, where proper knowledge of religion is replaced by something that is merely a knowledge of the psychological process or of how to bring about certain soul-states. These comprise the principal content, in accordance with the principle that repentance and conversion are the most important things—yet the path to them is so convoluted, so divided into stages, furnished with so many alien names all expressing the same thing, but seeming—through their strangeness and diversity—to conceal mysterious secrets and importances, adorned from gratia applicatrix to unio mystica, that one can no longer recognize the simplest matters within them.

And when one looks at it in the light with healthy eyes, one is ashamed that all this art and scholarship has been expended on something the common sense of a person could understand in fifteen minutes. Nowadays, it is recognized that subjective religion cannot be crammed into dogmatics, and objective religion now takes up the greater part—teachings which, if not always rational, at least occupy memory and understanding.

This ecclesiastical discipline of Christians is not something newly introduced into the statutes of the Christian society after its origin, but—as we have seen—it was already included in its first undeveloped draft, and then exploited and expanded by ambition and hypocrisy. Even if the traces of its grossest abuses have begun to fade, much of its spirit still lingers, offering yet another example among many that institutions and laws appropriate for a small society—where every citizen is free to be a member or not—are never suitable when extended to the large civil society, and cannot coexist with civic freedom.

Just as in a state where not every citizen is the natural defender of the fatherland, but where there are enough volunteers willing to assume that office for some pay, a society may form in which members agree never to take up arms, never to participate in wars whose legality they know as little as the benefits of the state’s victory in which they live—and who in no case believe themselves justified in undertaking the murder of other people, instead responding to all individual acts of violence with patience and submission.

But if such a society were to grow into a state, it could no longer maintain such principles universally—unless it were willing to risk, by suppressing all natural feeling, surrendering the entire structure of the nation’s happiness to the insolence of a handful of bandits.

Just as the best education for children is the good example they see daily around them—and just as they become more inclined to disobedience and sullen obstinacy the more they are constantly commanded—so it is also with the education of humankind at large. People resist, they shy away (as the French say, ils ne se prêtent pas, ils se refusent) from a religion that wants to shepherd them forever—preaching to them about countless virtues and vices they’ve never seen in such abstraction as described here, and that may be entirely unsuited to the human condition.

All the more, without realizing it, people are secretly influenced; even the freest person depends on the spirit of the people around him. He, who would otherwise most vigorously resist moralization, is affected when from the pulpit a general virtue or repentance and conversion are recommended: he receives it as spoken to himself because it applies to all as much as to him.

But when a detailed, vivid portrayal of prevalent depravity is presented—when individual features are woven in—it acts directly upon the one who sees himself reflected in it, who feels his own conduct criticized. The result is resentment: he recognizes no authority as entitled to assume such judgment over him.

(Children are guided by mere sense—by love and fear. Adults, however, are also capable of being guided by reason; at the very least, unlike the child, the adult does not do what is best for him only to please someone else, from love alone, without first seeing that it is indeed good.)

Everyone finds it intolerable when outsiders meddle in his affairs, especially his conduct. Most unbearable are moralists publicly set up to judge. The one who acts from a pure heart is most often misunderstood—by those who carry the moral and religious measuring stick.

On the Difference in the Scene of Death

The entire life of a Christian is meant to be a preparation for this transformation. His wishes are even directed toward it. Daily contact with images of death and the hopes of that life—compared to which the enjoyments and pleasures of this world, to which he is not attached and in which he takes only a weak, passing interest like a stranger—are unworthy of attention. These are meant to make his departure from this stage of activity not only not frightening but even pleasant.

Still less than fearing the moment of death itself does he dread annihilation, the end of harmony when the instrument is broken, or his future fate. His entire life has been a meditatio mortis; it appears to him merely as a preparatory school for what is to come. It has no value in itself, only in reference to the future. What are fifty or eighty years, devoted and consumed in preparation, when measured against the boundless eternity in which the entire duration of our existence is but a moment? Who could, in the span of sixty years, forget even for a moment the terrible alternative: eternal salvation—or eternal damnation?

Who would not flee from the ever-renewed fear of unworthiness toward the means of grace offered by the very doctrine that makes us aware of these terrors? Who would not prepare for the moment of this dreadful catastrophe, in which he not only bids farewell to everything dear to him, but within a few hours or minutes will never again see the radiance of this sun—but will instead behold the shimmer of the judgment throne before which his fate is now decided for eternity?

Who would not gather around himself all the weapons of consolation for this moment of anxious expectation? Who would not, even then, hurriedly pack together his spiritual belongings like someone suddenly forced to undertake a journey for which he had no time to prepare—as much as his time and illness permit?

Hence we see the beds of the sick surrounded by clergy and friends, who whisper the printed and prescribed sighs into the anxious soul of the dying. Hence we hear that in all memorials and admonitions, the conclusion is always the same refrain: memento mori. The most powerful of all motives for action is summoned from beyond the grave. Dying well or piously—still having enough presence of mind to recall the verses and rhymes learned with sweat in school and to be able to recite one or another of them—that is the hope.

Heroes of all nations die in the same way, because they have lived, and in living have learned to recognize the power of nature. But resistance to it, even to its lesser evils, leaves one unfit to endure its greater workings. How else could it be that peoples whose religion makes preparation for death a central point—a cornerstone of the entire edifice—die, on the whole, so unmanly, while other nations approach this moment more freely, like coming to a banquet?

One person begins in the early morning to curl his hair, to put on his finery, to harness his horses—full of the importance of the forthcoming enterprise, he spends the whole time considering how he will behave, how he will carry the conversation, and like a young orator, fears whether he will perform well. Another, by contrast, goes about his business in the morning and remembers the invitation only a few minutes before the banquet hour, joining simply and calmly—as if he were at home.

How different are the images of death that have passed into the imaginations of our people compared to the Greeks. Among the Greeks, death was represented as a beautiful genius, the brother of sleep, immortalized in monuments over their graves. Among us, it is the skeletal figure, the grinning skull parading above all coffins. For them, death reminded them of the enjoyment of life—for us, it teaches us to suffer through it. For them, it was a fragrance of life; for us, of death.

Just as, in respectable society, one does not speak of certain natural matters—or even write of them—so too did they euphemize death, soften its images. Their speakers and preachers did not seek to frighten them, nor to spoil their enjoyment of life by painting death with every possible ghastly hue.

On Objective Religion

By objective religion I understand the entire system of the connection between our duties and desires with the idea of God and the immortality of the soul. It is therefore also to be called theology, insofar as it does not merely occupy itself with the knowledge of the existence and attributes of God, but does so in relation to human beings and the needs of their reason.

Insofar as this theory does not merely exist in books, but the concepts are grasped by human beings, the love of duty and reverence for the moral law are felt and are strengthened by the idea—so far, religion is subjective. Now, since civil legislation does not aim at morality but only at legality, and since it makes no special provisions for the promotion of reverence toward the moral law or for the disposition to fulfill laws according to their spirit, and since this is instead regarded as belonging to religion—we do not want to separate the two here either. We shall regard as the aim of religious institutions not merely the promotion of morality through the idea of God, but the promotion of morality as such.

Not all drives of human nature—such as procreation and so on—have morality as their goal. But the highest end of the human being is morality, and among the faculties that promote this end, the disposition toward religion is one of the most excellent. The knowledge of God cannot, by its nature, be lifeless; it originates in a practical need, and from it morality springs anew. Or should the spread of Christ’s glory—or Muhammad’s—be its primary purpose, then Orpheus or Homer would deserve to be as famous and honored in Greece as Jupiter and Pallas. Then it would have reason to take the most pride in Charlemagne, the converter of the Saxons; or in the Spaniards who made proselytes in America; or in the missionary Schulz, who sought out Jews. Or if it is about glorifying the name of God, then there would be no better Christians than the hymn-singing Brigitte sisters, and the Pope at High Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica would be a more worthy object of divine favor than the corporal (Woltemar) who saved thirteen people from shipwreck at the risk of his own life and died during the attempt to save a fourteenth, in service to humanity.

To make objective religion subjective must be the great task of the state. Its institutions must accord with freedom of conviction, must not violate conscience and freedom, but instead act indirectly on the grounds for determination of the will. But how much can the state do? And how much must be left to each individual?

The promotion of morality—this aim of religion—is accomplished (a) through its teachings, (b) through ceremonies. Every religion has already provided for both and contains the basis for both. The state contributes through its constitution, through the spirit of its governance.

In what way does the Christian religion qualify for this?

a) Its practical teachings are pure and mostly present the good through examples. For instance, in Matthew 5, 6, and so forth, the spirit of morality is presented in general terms—not restricted merely to the formal—but also containing material prescriptions. For this reason, it is susceptible to misunderstanding, and indeed has been misunderstood.

b) The historical truths on which it is built always expose it to unbelief where the miraculous is concerned. As long as it remains a private religion, each person is free to believe or not—but as a public religion, unbelievers must necessarily exist.

c) It has not cared for the imagination the way Greek religion did. It is sorrowful, melancholic, Oriental—not born of our soil, never able to assimilate to it.

d) The ceremonies, meaningful in private religion, have lost their spirit and meaning when made public religion. Moreover, as means of grace, they are not united with a spirit of joy. Yet, once made public, they could have promoted tolerance—if only they had not been bound up with violently exclusive hypotheses. Now, unfortunately, they serve as distinguishing marks of sects—whereas they might have served as instruments of unity.

e) Other commands regarding lifestyle:

Withdrawal from public affairs
Distribution of alms
Collection of one’s property

All of this is possible in private religion, but not practicable in a state. And what are otherwise acts of piety are now entangled with public honor.

It Should Seem a Difficult Task…

It should seem a difficult task to establish a system of religious and moral truths that could win the free assent of all—or at least of most—since we regard it as a necessary condition of a popular religion that it not impose its teachings, nor violate anyone’s conscience through coercion. It appears difficult if one considers merely the vast diversity of systems and hypotheses devised by philosophers and theologians since reason began to develop ideas and to speculate about them. Precisely this experience—that such a variety of representations is possible, that many seem bizarre to us yet remain connected to universal ideas or needs of humanity and always find adherents—along with the additional experience that, as soon as public decree or prohibition attaches importance to a particular form of representation, not only is the freedom of conscience violated, but a dangerous fanaticism is easily inflamed—these experiences yield the very rule for the dogmas of a popular religion: that they must be as simple as possible, contain nothing not recognized by universal human reason, and nothing dogmatically asserted that exceeds the bounds of reason—even if the supposed authority for doing so stems from heaven itself.

Such doctrines are invariably exposed to the danger—sooner or later—of being challenged by reason. The premature fruits of speculation may perhaps be stifled, suppressed, cast down. But with advancing intellectual maturity, neither the burning of authors nor the banning of their books nor solemnly sworn symbols will stop the evil whose seed lies indestructibly in human nature. For reason leads irresistibly to the great principle of the self-sufficiency of duty and virtue—virtue, which cannot be genuinely promoted through more far-fetched or heterogeneous motives than through their own intrinsic worth. To attempt to promote them merely through association with the idea of God is already a profanation.

And if men of such conviction do not go so far as to deem the marvelous teachings harmful to morality and advantageous to despotism, they nevertheless consider their role as no more than a bridle for the vulgar mob. Now, convinced of the identity of their essence with their rational faith, each attempts to disarm his opponent in his own way. One refutes positive religion with arguments drawn from within it or from its own documents. Another uses the weapons of wit. A third is content with his conviction that the positive doctrines are in fact insignificant—yet, since they are something sacred in the beliefs of the people, he seeks to accommodate them to his own ideas.

We find this attitude in so many men who have developed the idea of morality purely from their own hearts—who beheld its beauty in that mirror and were enraptured by it, whose souls were most filled with reverence for virtue and moral greatness—in Spinoza, Shaftesbury, Rousseau, Kant. The greater their esteem for morality and for the moral teachings of Christ, the more foreign, the more dispensable the rest appears to them.

The mysteries, the incomprehensible dogmas—neither representable by reason nor by understanding—precisely because they are incomprehensible, are likewise unfit for the imagination, to which they are wholly contradictory. When such doctrines are brought forward, all three faculties—reason, understanding, and imagination—must suspend their usual operations; they must accept that one must, for the time being, wholly renounce their use. For their laws are just as unsuitable here as if one were to measure wine by the yardstick or fit a caricature into the form of an Apollo’s head.

Thus, only memory remains, which retains certain word-combinations, isolates them, and reveals them as little as possible to the understanding. Their chief remaining function lies in the extent to which such incomprehensible teachings concern the heart: the practical demands they make on the human being, the impulses they provide, the hopes they promise.

Some of these teachings are such that they have no practical aspect in themselves but only acquire such significance through association with others.

In general, the first law of all such teachings must be that they prescribe to the human being no way to please God other than by leading a good life; and that they offer no motives for moral conduct other than purely moral ones. Religion presents the idea of pleasing God in a more or less pure form: from the notion of striving to stand before God as the ideal of holiness, to the crude notion of gaining special favor with Him for some sensual ritual. There are many such gradations, which are rarely sufficiently distinguished or clearly thought. And since the notion of pleasing God, which religion presents as the highest aim, is so prone to impure admixtures, religion must take the greatest care to prevent practically harmful representations from slipping in.

The demand is inherently contradictory: that teachings which transcend reason and imagination, once placed in relation to the practical, should nonetheless show us no other way than that of a good life, no other means to please God than this. For if they show us no new path, they are not incomprehensible teachings, not mysteries. Doctrines that demand from us only certain rituals—be it verbal, or involving hands and feet; a concert of feelings; or certain privations, bodily punishments, or propositions to be believed—in order to please the holy being, as though one might thereby be exempted from the law of morality, are a web of teachings that, however sacredly sealed in the faith of peoples and in history, must be rejected by reason. In its demand for moral goodness, reason cannot make any concessions.

How corrupt are the structures of those states, or even just classes of people, where such principles prevail—where all natural relations are distorted by this immoral-religious hodgepodge—history has taught in every age, and teaches still today through the sad examples of states where these systems continue to reign, e.g., the Papal States, Naples, and only the never entirely extinguishable goodness of human nature—which here is indeed badly deformed—and the necessity of civil laws, which, in order to make society at least barely hold together, must somewhat correct those principles, prevent vice and evil inclinations from becoming entirely consistent with the teachings that nourish, absolve, and justify them.

I count among such teachings the publicly authorized belief that one may not only buy off one’s sins through attending Mass and indulgence trade, but also be in no way inferior to a good man; furthermore, that physical and other punishments are imposed for differences of opinion; that criminals are withdrawn from the arm of justice through asylums and taken under the protection of the interpreters of the deity; that it is not only considered more meritorious to believe, but is also publicly instituted, that only the beggar is favored, while the industrious man fares badly. And here we are not speaking merely of the doctrines of a few sophists or empiricists, who, perhaps with philosophical acumen, did not find the principles which fix the distinction between virtue and vice sufficiently well grounded, or of libertines who never troubled themselves about such matters or whose passions prevented them from listening to the voice of virtue—not of such isolated individuals, as there are everywhere—but of the fact that those principles which distort morality and dishonor both humanity and divinity are not merely discussed by idle heads in study rooms or on academic chairs—nor simply, without noticeable harm to the commonwealth, adopted by some professor who might take happiness, or otherwise empirical principles, as the foundation of morality or natural law—but that these principles are not only publicly taught, but also, which speaks more forcefully than teaching, are most intimately interwoven into the entire fabric of the state. Men who feel the need for better principles—as well as otherwise good people—cannot, in such states, walk the permitted highway of humility and vice; they must bring their better sentiments into accord with those principles by means of such contrivances as they must conceal from their reason but which nevertheless satisfy their hearts.

Such teachings must therefore be unconditionally rejected by reason, whether they are selected as principles for the individual or for broader concerns that touch the economy of the entire state.

Aside from this, however, the positive doctrines of a religion—those which the development of human reason could not itself discover—may aim at a better end. Especially in more recent times, great effort has been made to extract and cultivate the practical moment from every dogmatic teaching.

Attempts to render the mysteries of religion palatable to reason have been abandoned, and nowadays great value is placed on the distinction that such teachings are above reason but not contrary to it—a distinction that, though it expresses a certain cautious regard and reverence for reason’s authority, ultimately does not go very far. For if reason is the highest judge of its belief, it will not accept, nor believe, what it considers itself incapable of attaining within the full range of its use and application—just as geography, after all attempts at navigation fail to discover a northwest passage through America, will boldly assert that no such passage exists. Such words, therefore, that are lost to reason—because it cannot comprehend them, are unthinkable for the understanding, and unimaginable for the imagination—can only have importance for the heart, insofar as they influence the determination of the will.

It is undeniable that certain aspects of the supernatural Christian doctrines do not aim at genuine morality but only at legality. If they can be refined and transformed to become moral, it must nonetheless be admitted that such attempts were only made in response to the objections and criticisms of opponents, and for a long time they were actually only used to storm the imagination of dreamers when the torch of the law burned dimly—or they inspired hope that morality might arrive by supernatural means, or intensified the fear of being worsened by precisely such supernatural mechanisms. I need only refer to the representations—on the one hand of rewards cast in mystical beatitudes, childish, frivolous, or grounded in immoral pride; on the other, of punishments more vividly portrayed than the rewards, in their lurid, sensual images—of the torments of hell, where the devil, with ever-renewed inventiveness, eternally and without hope of salvation tortures the souls—eternally, eternally. It is no wonder that some imaginations succumbed under the power of these representations, became deranged, and drove many people to despair or madness.

When the imagination of Greek bacchantes went wild with the delusion of seeing the deity present and led to the wildest outbursts of lawless intoxication, that was a frenzy of joy and jubilation—a rapture that soon returned to ordinary life. But those religious excesses of the imagination are eruptions of the saddest, most fearful despair, which disintegrate the organs from their very foundation and are often incurable. The details, even the more definite features of these images, are supplied not just by the doctrine but by dogmatics themselves—it is left only to the more or less vivid imagination of the preacher to render them more or less terrifying.

The expectation of rewards and punishments in another world is so naturally grounded in the practical need of reason to establish a connection between this life and the next, that it has always been a central tenet of all religions. But to be worthy of a moral religion, its treatment must be careful in order to secure its place in the belief of the people.

As for the cultivation of imagination, that is not under consideration here—only the doctrine, insofar as it is based on the supra-rational principles which Christian religion offers—although belief in the products of the imagination is also demanded as dogma. The doctrine of the resurrection of the body has no great moral importance; it has merely had the consequence—though itself insignificant—that through it, the concept of the human soul as a more spiritual, incorporeal being could not become widespread, or rather, the hope of the continuation of personal existence—which death, so naturally, seems to extinguish—was aided by the notion that the soul, lacking the idea of an incorporeal, imperishable, immortal being, would be resurrected as the body, not merely as its intimate companion, but as its very self.

The hope of compensation for endured suffering is a consoling thought, a thought we demand from justice. But we must accustom ourselves not to regard everything that goes contrary to our expectations as an injustice. We must learn to view ourselves as more dependent on nature. The development of our political and civil relations and the inequality in lifestyle and goods has not only increased misery of all kinds, but also our susceptibility and sensitivity to it. To the sufferings we are exposed to by nature and by our lifestyle, which so often deviates from it, there is very often added discontent and impatience—springing from the demand that everything should go well and according to our wishes, and from the belief that misfortune is itself a form of injustice.

Behind the supposed contempt for the goods and honors of this world often lurks a poorly disguised envy of those who possess them; the contempt is often mere resentment, and the deprivation of such things is then regarded as an injustice, as suffering deserving of compensation. Many people, convinced that the sufferings of this world are not worthy of the glory in the next, believe that without suffering, they cannot partake in it at all; even while living a peaceful life and fulfilling their duties, they remain not only vigilant over their virtue but genuinely anxious—and create for themselves a host of real or imagined sufferings, lamenting this world as a vale of tears, even though they truly have nothing to complain about. All such dispositions lead away from the spirit and the truth of a hoped-for moral connection between this life and the next.

WHEN ONE WRITES ABOUT THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION…

Whenever one writes about the Christian religion, one is constantly exposed to the risk of being accused of misrepresenting its purpose and essence. And whenever one finds something objectionable in the conception one has formed of it, the reply is immediately at hand: this does not apply to the Christian religion itself, but only to a particular conception of it. If one then asks to be shown the doctrinal concept in which the pure system of Christianity may reliably be found, all the gentlemen will respond with one voice: “Are you not familiar with my compendium?” But, gentlemen, your self-authored compendia, or those which you take as the basis of your system of faith, are themselves so diverse that one must ask you first to come to agreement among yourselves before you dismiss something as not belonging to Christianity.

What will here be regarded as belonging to the Christian religion is either drawn directly from the New Testament or, aside from a few enlightened textbooks and the convictions of a small number of enlightened individuals, still represents the publicly acknowledged popular doctrine recognized by consistories and church councils—the doctrine still heard from most pulpits and schools, and the system in which the now grown-up generation was largely educated. For this reason, it remains important to illuminate certain aspects of this economy of salvation—at least until healthier ideas have taken more universal hold, and those systems remain of interest only to the curious researcher examining the spirit of past times.

I therefore do not believe myself to have fallen into the error of those who fabricate a target only to be able to strike it. No assurance would bring me more satisfaction than being told, with regard to certain notions which seemed offensive to me, that it was unnecessary to bring them up, since they have long been forgotten—if I could otherwise accept this assurance as generally true.

The effect of religion lies in strengthening the motives of morality through the idea of God as moral lawgiver, and in the satisfaction of the demands of our practical reason concerning the highest good as the end it sets for us. Because of these effects, religion can become an object of legislation and administration by the state, and the natural human need for it can be met by special institutions. Usually, the will of a nation has already long declared itself for a particular religion before governments were able to make it their own purpose. Only the propagation, maintenance, and continual renewal of knowledge of this religion can be made the aim of governance.

When one considers how great the influence of public institutions is—especially among the masses in monarchies—for preserving a specific religious system, and how rarely the people are in a position to investigate or choose for themselves, but generally remain passive in their instruction, it becomes fair to ask: Is the religion which was once appropriate for the people—otherwise it would not have turned to it—still appropriate in the same form under completely changed circumstances? Was the religion, in its original form, of such a nature that it could maintain its dignity and suitability as both a public and private religion, and exercise its effectiveness equally under all changes in government and enlightenment? Has the spirit of the people gradually discarded or transformed what in it was merely temporal? Or have those in power taken it into their hands, laying claim to the religion, and invested themselves in preserving its inherited form as a precious trust to be handed unchanged to posterity?

Whenever changes became the collective need of a nation, they were no longer preventable—but they always required centuries to occur. The people were usually content with a single upheaval and then allowed the reins to be taken from their hands again, which—through attachment to the new foundation and the fear that it might be taken away from them again—rendered further progress and reform impossible for centuries.

A religion can be considered:

a) with respect to its teachings
b) with respect to its traditions
c) with respect to its ceremonies
d) with respect to its relation to the state, or as a public religion (i.e., institutional arrangements)

What are the requirements for a public religion from these points of view—and are these fulfilled by the Christian religion?

a) Practical reason posits for the human being the highest goal of all striving: the realization of the highest good in the world—morality in union with appropriate happiness. I believe one can take it as a fairly general doctrine of Christianity that the hope of eternal blessedness is the greatest interest of the Christian—compared to which all else has only subordinate value. God’s favor is important to the Christian because He is the dispenser of that blessedness. The concept of blessedness in Christianity, regarding its content, largely coincides with what reason posits.

But the supreme condition for the possibility of the highest good, according to reason, is the moral disposition’s conformity to the moral law. According to the Christian religion, however, the supreme condition for eternal blessedness is belief in Christ and in the power of His atoning death—and not because such faith might ultimately lead to morality, which would then be the true condition and faith only the means. Rather, faith in itself is the ground of God’s favor, and this favor bestows eternal blessedness on those who believe in Christ, who could never truly earn it themselves.

This difference regarding what is supposed to be the highest commandment for humanity leads to further consequences—or rather, it is built upon certain important prior theses: namely, that through all efforts, through all sincere striving for the good, the human being, because of total incapacity for morality, can never achieve the merit of blessedness. The degree of blessedness allotted to him is due solely to the undeserved grace of God. From God’s justice, he would have nothing to expect but misfortune and punishment. Thus, the principle is presupposed: the good person deserves blessedness; he may claim it as a right; he is worthy of it. But this possibility—that someone could even become a good person—is precluded.

These doctrines have repeatedly been countered—often to the point of tedium—by appeals to Socrates, to so many virtuous pagans, to entire nations of innocent people. Yet the miserable answer always returns—an answer offensive to any feeling person who believes in virtue, hatched by some heartless Church Father and parroted ad nauseam by equally hollow followers: that these were only “glittering vices.”

The principle so deeply rooted in the general moral nature of humanity—that the good person is worthy of blessedness, a principle which expresses itself universally in the judgments of common sense—is acknowledged even by theologians in their doctrine of divine justice. But it is a principle that troubles them. They seek to hide it, are unwilling to admit it outright, for it conflicts in some measure with their fundamental doctrine of the all-sufficient suffering and death of Christ.

The doctrine of the depravity not only of all humans, but of human nature itself—despite being contradicted by experience (except where corrupt governments have degraded humanity)—was not established merely by the weak exegesis of a few scattered scriptural passages that seemed to suggest it. It was developed and maintained because of the central importance it holds in the overall system. From this supposed depravity and aversion to the good—against which reason feels an “irresistible disgust”—people even believed they had found the physical cause in Holy Scripture. They failed to consider that this hereditary transmission—where the human will has absolutely no influence and even children are declared worthy of punishment—effectively exonerates the human being of all guilt. For where there is no practical freedom, there can be no moral responsibility. If one is deprived of the capacity to recognize the good as such, to value it, and to prefer it over sensual impulses, then imputation is impossible.

Thus, it was only consistent that the pagans were condemned without grace or mercy—and the more humane sentiment of those theologians today who no longer dare to pronounce such verdicts so openly stands in stark contradiction to the rest of their system.

Since morality cannot be made the highest condition for blessedness—because human beings are supposedly incapable of it—something else had to be substituted by God’s merciful grace: namely, faith in Christ. One may demand good works as a necessary part of that faith, yet according to the theologians’ own formulation, it is not those works—which alone could give us merit or personal worth—that first draw God’s favor. Rather, faith comes first.

And faith depends, in turn, on a conviction of the understanding or imagination, requiring one to accept as true things that are partly based on historical credibility, and partly of such a nature that reason cannot reconcile itself with them. Faith in Christ as a historical person is not grounded in any need of practical reason, but in the testimony of others.

What is of interest to reason—what sets a highest final end for the existence and activity of the human being, what constitutes the keystone of the entire system of his reassurance, the resolution of questions that are important to him—must, according to reason itself, have its principle, its foundation, in reason. The only thing needed is the development of this reason in order to provide each person with the solution to those problems. Access to this solution is therefore open to everyone who wishes to listen to the voice of reason (“day unto day uttereth speech…”). Historical faith, on the other hand, is limited by its very nature. Its dissemination depends on contingent circumstances; it is a source from which not everyone can draw—and yet the condition for God’s favor toward us, our eternal fate, is supposed to depend on it.

One may humble oneself as much as one likes before the unknowability of the ways and purposes of Providence—though in other cases people think they have traced it with great precision. We do not ask why nature denied animals the talents of humanity, its capacity for reason and morality. But if a wretched pride—resting on the assumed depravity of our nature—refuses to place us above so many countless other nations, then we are entitled to expect that the means, the schooling toward a perfection which alone gives worth to man, be open to the whole human race.

There are only two possibilities: either the greater part of humanity was excluded from the blessing that faith brings—while we, whose depravity is at least equal (by our own admission) to that of the rest of humankind and thus deserved no better, were chosen to receive it. In that case, we must deny our reason and the general human moral sense the important concept of worthiness for happiness—a worthiness based on morality—and negate the moral relationship of divinity to the world and to human beings, as well as the concept of divine justice, which alone makes God’s existence meaningful to us. We must deny that God’s moral attributes are in any way knowable, that we can form any idea of His moral nature—of how He judges humans, of what virtue is in His eyes—even while we are expected to learn about His many transcendental and utterly mysterious attributes from Christian religion. Either we must give up this entire undertaking, or else we must admit that such faith is not of the enormous importance people claim for it—not the sole, exclusive condition under which human beings can grasp their purpose in the world or possess worth before God and reason.

The grounds for belief in Christ rest on history. Where simplicity of customs has preserved a people from great inequalities of class, and where history unfolded on their own soil, legends are passed from parents to children and become the property of all. But once special estates arise in a nation, once the father of the family is no longer also the high priest, a distinct estate emerges that becomes the depository of the legends, and from it knowledge of them spreads to the people. This is especially the case when the legends originate in a foreign land, among foreign customs, in a foreign language. Then the content of the legends in their original form can no longer be common property; for to learn that form requires time and a broad apparatus of knowledge.

In this way, that estate soon acquires control over the public faith, extending its power over religious teachings or at least retaining control over them. Faith in what others tell us—people who possess our trust or who have been granted state authority to be believed—is an infinitely more convenient thing than accustoming oneself to independent thought. Historical faith is indeed capable of stimulating inquiry, but it is not in its nature to awaken a spirit of reflection. With moral or prudential rules, everyone feels entitled and obliged to bring them into connection with personal feeling and experience and to judge their truth and applicability. But in the case of historical truths, the people are trained to believe what they have been taught from youth and to never doubt it—condemned never to engage in an examination of its truth.

If the ground of our salvation is not to rest in what our reason, our attention to ourselves and others, and our own thinking can examine, but in the authority of those whom the state has specially entrusted with preserving these historical truths, then perhaps it lies in the nature of the matter that use and cultivation of reason, trust in one’s own insights, and independence of conviction are so little promoted and so rarely widespread.

Faith is, ultimately, still exposed to contingency. However tightly surrounded it may be by authorities, however finely and ingeniously the surrounding system may be constructed—such that one can hardly challenge it without becoming entangled in an endless web of hypotheses and possibilities—yet in the end reason dares to examine that faith from within itself, to draw the principles of possibility and probability from its own resources. It casts aside the elaborate historical edifice and claims primacy for rational conviction over any beliefs based on historical grounds.

Once reason has been cultivated enough to feel its own autonomy, its conviction—drawn from and grounded in itself—becomes so strong that it either completely disregards that historical faith and its arguments, becomes utterly indifferent to it, and is then reproached for criminal frivolity; or, if one does not cease to confront reason with that faith and attempt to batter it with it, and if reason does not succeed in refuting the historical faith on its own grounds—perhaps due to lack of scholarly apparatus—then it is accused of willful blindness. Or else reason attempts to undermine historical faith by wit, by exposing the absurdity of certain narratives; or it treats sacred history like any other human work, presupposing that its stories may have changed or originated only in folk belief, just as with other traditions. Or it attacks the historical faith with its own weapons and does not find in its foundational texts what the faith draws from them, even as it tries to conform itself to them in every possible way. In such cases, reason is accused of lacking reverence for the divine word—of malice and dishonesty.

Faith in Christ is faith in a personified ideal (see note 3). But why are examples of other human beings not sufficient to strengthen us in the struggle for virtue, to awaken within us the divine spark, the power we carry within to master the sensuous? Why do we not recognize in virtuous people not only “flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone,” but also, in moral sympathy, “spirit of our spirit, strength of our strength”?

Ah! We have been persuaded that these capacities are alien to us, that humanity belongs merely to the order of natural beings—and corrupt ones at that. The idea of holiness has been completely isolated and attributed solely to a distant being. It has been deemed incompatible with embodiment in a sensuous nature. Thus, if moral perfection is to be ascribed anywhere, it cannot be understood as a part of our own being. It must be made possible only through the union (unio mystica) of that supreme being with us—through His indwelling and operation within us.

This degradation of human nature has prevented us from recognizing ourselves in virtuous individuals. For an ideal that would serve us as the image of virtue, there had to be a God-man. Fortunate are we, if we still find the truly divine in Him—not precisely in His being the second person of the Godhead, begotten by the Father from eternity, and so on, but in the fact that His spirit and disposition were in harmony with the moral law—the idea of which we must, after all, draw from ourselves, even if its letter has been given in signs and words.

That the truly divine in Him has often been misunderstood or ignored is shown, on the one hand, by the life-or-death disputes of theologians and priests—those whose duty it was to keep attention on those moral attributes—over predicates so fruitless for morality as the eternal generation, or the mode of union between the divine and the human nature, and so forth. Over these non-essential attributes one finds the most exhaustive distinctions in scholastic compendia—distinctions so refined that they slip through one’s fingers. These various opinions have been elevated into essential tenets of religion; they did not remain in the study but enlisted the people and governments to persecute dissenters with force, bloodshed, and imprisonment.

On this path, the essential nature of the ideal has clearly been overlooked and misunderstood—the quality that made it an ideal, something divine, for us. Equally tragic are the many experiences that show this was not the only way it could be misunderstood. People clung to still more irrelevant attributes, sacrificing their own and others’ blood for His mere name, for words associated with Him, or allegedly derived from Him (see note 4). As to how arrangements could be made so that in Christ one does not merely recognize the man or the name, but virtue itself—and love it—this question rests on the resolution of the broader problem: how can a people be raised to a receptivity for moral ideas and to morality itself?

The elaboration of that problem goes too far for our present purposes. We are only concerned with the incidental role that Christian religion might play, through the detour of its faith, in contributing to that end. But the axis on which the entire hope of our salvation turns is the faith in Christ as the reconciler of God with the world—as the one who, in our place, bore the punishment that humanity deserved, either through natural depravity or through its own guilt. These sufferings—those of an innocent being (for He was God)—are supposed to be deducted from the immeasurable guilt of the human race and credited to our account.

Against this keystone in the structure of Christian faith, all other doctrines are to be understood as mere supporting columns. That is why it was necessary to assert the worthlessness of human beings and their natural incapacity ever to possess value. That is why the doctrine of Christ’s divinity was introduced—only the suffering of such a being could balance the guilt of humankind. That is why the doctrine of God’s free grace was needed: because the history to which our salvation is bound could remain unknown to half the world without fault of their own—and why many other related doctrines had to be developed.

Even if one discards the crude notion that Christ literally bore the punishment for the whole world in His suffering—and instead merely says that God tied the forgiveness of our sins to those sufferings, that they were the condition for the return of His grace—this remains incomprehensible from the standpoint of our moral relation to God and does little to remedy the absurdity. The core idea remains: that on account of another’s merit, humanity is forgiven its guilt—if only it believes this.

NOW THE MASSES NEED…

Now the masses, which no longer possess any public virtue, which live discarded and oppressed, require other supports, other comforts, in order to have some compensation for their misery—which they no longer dare to diminish. The inner certainty of faith in God and immortality must be replaced by external assurances, by trust in men who claim to know more about such things, who know how to create the impression that they can.

The free republican who, in the spirit of his people, expends his strength and his life for his fatherland out of a sense of duty, does not value his effort so highly as to demand recompense or compensation for it. He has acted for his idea, for his duty—what else is there to demand? He merely hopes that, because he was virtuous, he may live among heroes in Elysium or Valhalla, there to be happier than here only because he is freed from the torments of frail humanity. Likewise, one who has internalized obedience to nature and necessity as a maxim of reason, and who honors that law—though it be incomprehensible to us—as sacred, what claims for compensation can remain for him? What compensation can an Oedipus demand for his undeserved suffering, if he believed himself to be in the service of fate?

But to make blind obedience to the evil whims of depraved men into a maxim—that is something only a people of the highest corruption, of the deepest moral impotence, is capable of. Only the passage of time, only the complete forgetting of a better condition, can bring them to such a state. A people like this, abandoned by themselves and by all the gods, leading a merely private life, needs signs and wonders. It needs divine assurances that there is a life after this one—because it can no longer sustain this belief within itself. And yet it is not capable of grasping the idea of morality, of founding its faith on that idea. The ideas themselves have withered and become chimeras. Its faith can only cling to an individual, can only lean on a person who serves as an example, as the object of its admiration.

Hence the open, enthusiastic reception of the Christian religion during the time when public virtue among the Romans had disappeared, when their external greatness was in decline. Hence, when after centuries humanity once again becomes capable of ideas, the interest in the individual fades. The experience of human depravity remains, but the doctrine of human reprobation diminishes. And what once made the individual interesting now gradually emerges in its own right as an idea, in its beauty—something we think ourselves, something that becomes our property.

We come to recognize joyfully as our own creation the beauty of human nature, which we had formerly projected onto that foreign individual, retaining only what is disgusting and vile as belonging to ourselves. We re-appropriate that beauty and thereby learn to feel self-respect—whereas before we believed that only what was contemptible belonged to us.

In private life, love of life—comfort and its embellishment—had to be our highest interest. These, when brought into a system of prudence, formed our morality. Now, however, if moral ideas are able to take root in man, those goods decline in value, and constitutions that guarantee only life and property are no longer regarded as the best. The whole anxious apparatus, the artificial system of motives and consolations in which so many thousands of weak souls found their sustenance, becomes dispensable. The system of religion, which always took on the coloring of the times and of the state constitutions—whose highest virtue was humility, the awareness of one’s impotence, of needing everything from elsewhere, even expecting evil to come partly from within—will now receive its own true, independent dignity.

A Manuscript on Psychology and Transcendental Philosophy
1794

Empirical – Rational

Psychology

The faculty of receiving representations by the manner in which we are affected by objects – to acquire them – is sensibility (Anschauung) – distinguished from concepts (Begriffe). This effect is sensation (Empfindung). A concept refers to objects only indirectly, by means of general marks.

Reason (Vernunft) merely extends the boundaries of sensibility as a practical faculty, insofar as it spontaneously enacts a law of the will.

A priori, a posteriori
Synthetic judgments, analytic

Fundamental faculties: experience does not reveal any (nor does abstraction)—from them all others could be understood, just as one understands the different effects of gunpowder or the word of a general.

Faculty of representation (Vorstellungsvermögen) – General power:
In consciousness, the representation (Vorstellung) is distinguished by the subject from both subject and object, and referred to both.

Law of consciousness: The remaining branches cannot be derived from this alone.

(e.g. the explosion of gunpowder)
Faculties:
– Cognition (Erkenntnis)
– Sensibility (Empfindsamkeit)
– Faculty of desire (Begehrungsvermögen)

I. Section: Faculty of Cognition
I. Faculty of Sensibility (Empfindungsvermögen)
II. Imagination (Phantasie) (lower faculty)
III. Understanding and Reason (Verstand und Vernunft) (higher faculty)

Sensory representations
The capacity to receive representations through the manner in which we are affected by objects – this is sensibility (Anschauung). Sensibility is distinguished from concepts. That effect is sensation (Empfindung). A concept refers to objects only indirectly, through general marks.

A) External Sense, B) Internal Sense

A. External Sense

I. Laws – External Conditions Under Which an Intuition Enters Consciousness

Presence
Vulnerability of the nerves—namely, the particular manner in which a given set of nerves is connected to the brain (or to the spine), and whether they remain unimpeded or not.
Sufficient intensity and duration (Hinlängliche Stärke und Dauer)
Propagation along the nerves all the way to the brain (or more precisely: to whatever part of the central organ is the seat of sensation)
a. Nerves that are severed or not in connection with the brain cannot transmit a sensation.
b. Nerves within the brain or within the spinal cord that belong to sensation must be intact.
c. The brain itself must be uninjured.
d. People may still feel pain in a limb they no longer possess.
e. Voices may be heard without any external stimulus (as in the case of fanatics or hallucinations).

Question: the seat of the soul

How do the nerves become instruments of sensation?
a) By means of a fluid (“nerve fluid”)
b) By means of membranes (the coverings of the nerves)
c) By means of vibration


a) Analogy	b) Quantity of blood flowing to the brain

II. Internal Sense
(That is, a self-active function on the part of the soul)

Attention (“Aufmerksamkeit”): the capacity of the soul to recognize and distinguish representations received from others, to dwell on them for a few moments—without spreading itself over too many objects at once.
- In solitude, states of self-observation arise (e.g. Rousseau’s example).
- If attention is directed elsewhere or dispersed among many objects, one does not become aware of a given representation—there is an art to seeing, as every craft or science has its own sensitivity that perceives more than others, via distinguishing concepts.

II. Different Kinds: A. The Main Categories

Only those (perceptual faculties) that inform us about properties of objects—not hunger, nor the feeling of pleasure or displeasure, nor other internal drives. All these involve feeling, are found in everyone, but they do not account for the differences among sensory faculties.

Sense of Touch (Tactile Faculty) (“Gefühlsvermögen – Berührung”):
Each sense in this category is immediate upon the nerves of the skin. We perceive size, solidity, impenetrability, hardness, roughness, smoothness.
Taste (“Geschmack”):
Located on the tongue and palate—cannot be named (in isolation of particular tastes).
Smell (“Geruch”):
In the mucous membrane of the nose—fine particles that can be lost in quantity. Very persistent odor perception over time.
Hearing (“Gehör”):
Caused by the tremulous motion of the air—tenuous tones.
Sight (“Gesicht”):
Light rays refracted in the moisture of the eye—light and colors (pure colors must be distinguished from mixed ones). Distinguishing distance is difficult for children and congenitally blind persons.

A. In What Ways Do These Senses Differ from One Another?

a) Constitution and fineness of the organs in proportion to the fineness of the matter sensed.
b) Manner of being affected—immediate or mediated:

Touch affects the entire mass of matter directly.
Taste responds to saline, sweet, or sulfurous particles.
Smell responds to contact with the finer particles.
Hearing’s medium is air.
Sight’s medium is air and luminous matter.
c) Extent and range (in order of rank: sight, hearing, taste, etc.).
d) Clarity of perception.
e) Ease of reproduction (i.e., how readily impressions can be evoked again)—most vivid for sight and hearing.

Comment (marginal):
d) Visual representations are clear; one can distinguish partial representations.
Unlike hearing, the senses of smell and taste do not readily form mixtures.
e) In terms of content: visual and tactile representations awaken the concept of space; the others connect only afterward.
The “sense” faculties yield feelings of modifications within ourselves—at most up to the thought that the object is distinct from us.

II. Inner Sense

These concerns those “objects” of perception that we can imagine in time alone, or those determinations of our own self—since all perceptions are changes in our own self.

A. Objects of Perception of the Inner Sense
a) Self-active expressions of the power of thought and the will, whether immediately or only in their effects.
b) Passive changes—states of mind (Gemütszustände).
c) The feeling of our self—self-consciousness—associated with every change: how one experiences oneself, through organs of perception.

B. Are there changes and states of which we are not—or only sometimes—aware?

It is likely that in every minute there are certain modifications that we do not notice.

a) Ideas retained in the soul.
b) Composite representations, many of which are only partially clear—some parts remain obscure.

Representations in the soul processed without its conscious awareness.
– The soul’s fundamental power of representation works invisibly (e.g., in dreaming, one resolves to rise at a certain hour but does not remember or consciously know it; somnambulism—sleepwalking—occurs without conscious direction, yet the idea that previously occupied it remains).
– Stupor (Starrsucht) likewise occurs without awareness, though the idea that engaged the mind beforehand persists.

C. Laws of Clarity
a) According to the nature of internal changes:
– We perceive weaker impressions with more difficulty than livelier ones (as in deep sleep).
– If the number of simultaneous changes is too great, consciousness is overwhelmed—strong passions may result in unconsciousness. One may feel a change in passion yet not perceive it.

b) According to the state and condition of the soul itself:
– Habit may obstruct recognition.
– An external sensation may interrupt awareness.
– Occupation with other representations (e.g., sadness) may prevent noticing.
– When the soul is diverted by the stimulus of change—especially by something unpleasant—it withdraws attention and does not seek to retain it.
– The new impression is favored by exercise and habit.

Imagination (Phantasie)

I. Retention of representations (Memory)
II. Revival of representations (Recollection)
III. Recognition (Errinnerung)
IV. Creative (poetic) faculty (Dichtungsvermögen)

I. Retention (Memory)

a. Representations are retained—revival presupposes retention.
b. Where? Three possibilities:

Only in the soul.
Only in the brain.
In both simultaneously.

a) This is most likely, but we know nothing precise about the constitution of the retained traces themselves. There is only a disposition or facility for such changes; for instance, headaches may arise from prolonged reflection, indicating a change in the brain connected with the soul’s occupation. Memory is weakened by illness. In fever, representations may arise against one’s own will—likely due to certain dispositions in the brain (no further details can be established; these are mere hypotheses).

b) In the soul itself:
– (aa) Internal changes leave traces behind.
– (bb) The soul’s own power to unify those representations into an inner unity—purely the soul’s work.
– (cc) Calling up multiple representations by means of a name: the soul recognizes them—hence, an “intellectual” representation.

C. Laws of Retention of Representations

a) Depends on the nature of the impressions themselves: the clearer and stronger an impression is, the more readily it is retained.
b) Depends on the capacity of the organs: they are too supple in childhood, too rigid in old age.
c) Depends on the activity, condition, and constitution of the soul itself:

Attention: The longer the soul dwells on a representation, the more surely it is retained.
Relation of the impression: If it is pleasant, or aligns with one’s system of ideas, or if it serves as a marked contrast.
d) Are traces ever completely erased from the soul or the brain? This cannot be definitively proven.
– Remarkable experience: long-forgotten representations can reappear under extraordinary circumstances.

Marginal note 1:
The brain is not “disposed” to receive changes on its own; the soul itself cannot actively implant those traces.

Marginal note 2:
Representations in the soul can succeed one another against the soul’s will.

B. Revival of Representations

I. According to Which Laws

a) Particular (Special) Laws

Associations of place and time (spatial memory – verbal memory).
– When one returns to a place, the verbal memory returns as well, even if the original cause is absent—the return of one evokes the return of the other.
– Spatial and verbal memory underlie our capacity for language. Words are arbitrary signs of ideas.
Subject–object relations—the whole and its parts.
Cause and effect—e.g., hail, weather.
Similarity of representations—portraits, ghost stories.
Contrast—darkness versus light, cold versus sickness.
Sign and signified.

b) General Law

If two representations enter the soul simultaneously or in immediate succession, in a relationship of coexistence or succession—so that each one awakens the other—then either:
a) Clearly (if representation A is vivid), or
b) If B and A are similar, then X is awakened jointly in both, coexisting with partial marks of each.

c) Why, of several representations linked by coexistence or succession, do only certain ones awaken one another and not others?

Habitual vividness: The more habitual a certain type of representation is, the more easily it is awakened by one connected to it—e.g., any craft or trade.
Degree of connection: The more frequently and intimately two ideas A and B have been thought together, the more relations they share—hence the stronger the association, and the greater the similarity.
Liveliness and recency: The clearer and more vivid a representation is—especially if it occurred only recently—the more easily it is reproduced.
Relation to a present passion: If a representation relates to the soul’s current mood or passion—to sustain or intensify it—then it rejects all other impressions not similarly connected. It is not linked to them except insofar as they serve that passion. Guided by external objects, it drags everything into its own sphere. If two passions are concurrent, the associated representations alternate.

C. False (Pseudo-) Memory and Creative (Poetic) Imagination

I. Fine Distinction from Sensory Representations

– Through weakness of the impression—accompanied by a representation of the absence of its object, combined with a sensory representation of presence.
a) It can happen that an imaginative representation is just as vivid as reality; the soul is not sufficiently reflective and therefore confuses them—e.g., fever paroxysms, mania, or a visionary’s native imaginative power, which certain external means may intensify (e.g., children wet the bed when obsessively thinking of their dreams). In wakeful reflection on one’s dreams, terrifying imaginative representations can arise.
b) Sensory representations are weaker (by comparison) than imaginative ones—hence dreams. There is no universal criterion. In each person, a sensory impression has a fixed relation to its imaginative counterpart—one that the understanding cannot determine.

B. Relation to Other Representations

– Rarely is one representation isolated; more often, a whole network of visual representations exists, together with ideas of other senses—sounds, words, early feelings (even odors or tastes), when those are salient properties.

V. Consequences of Revival of a Representation

a) In the soul: The same state that originally accompanied it returns.
b) In the body:

An involuntary movement typically accompanies that representation (e.g., a gesture, a habit associated with the idea).
A voluntary movement may also accompany it (e.g., a musician or hunter practicing a certain sequence of bodily movements that they link to an idea—pressing the piano keys, drawing a bow).

C. I. Recollection – Recognition

Comparing and distinguishing between a present impression and a previous one—being conscious that the present representation is identical to one already had.

Difference from mere power of reproduction:
a) A reproduced representation may be present without the conscious awareness of “this is the same as before.”
b) The power of recollection (Errinnerungsvermögen) is at work not only in revived representations but also in real sensations.
c) Recollection operates even when the power of reproduction is incapable (e.g., when sensory pathways are compromised).

II. Rules for Recollection

a) Clarity of consciousness of the sensation to be recalled—e.g., reflecting upon a passage in a book prepares one for subsequent recall.
b) Circumstantial conditions that aid revival—various incidental cues.
– Lakuna in memory—occasionally only corporeal or mechanical causes explain recall (e.g., a different feeling in a head cold, or a fever’s peculiar sensations).

D. Creative (Poetic) Faculty (Dichtungsvermögen)

The capacity to produce representations that differ in size, quality, and arrangement from those previously experienced:

a) Reordering images in an entirely different arrangement, position, or proportion—projecting representations of parts.
b) Separating or combining components of an impression (e.g., as a painter does).
c) Enlargement or diminution—creating something vastly great or sublimely noble.
d) Generalized images—sensory abstractions—merging similar elements into a new whole—analysis or synthesis of simple or composite representations.

– Imagination may operate either involuntarily or under the guidance of understanding and reason.
– A certain power of reproduction is not compatible with creative power.

Application to certain states in which imagination participates:
– Dreaming (Traüme)
– Somnambulism (Nachtwandeln)
– Delirium (Verrückung)
– Premonitions and visions (Ahnungen, Visionen)

I. Dreaming

a) Distinction from waking
– Representations are dim, yet often vivid.
– Haller: Inability to move oneself voluntarily and perceive clearly despite healthy organs—an incapacity for clear outward sensation not caused by passion but by gradual bodily fatigue.

– Various kinds of sleep:
1. Deep sleep: One cannot later recall the dream. Voluntary movements of the body and all external sensations are absent.
2. Dream-sleep: A sequence of representations of the soul is present; one can think of and recall them in consciousness—they are all imagination, not actual sensory perceptions, and often occur without any bodily movement.
3. Somnambulism (Sleepwalking):
– Voluntary and more vigorous movements arise, and clearer sensations from certain senses are obtained (e.g., a sleepwalker may carry out complex tasks without a clear notion of the danger).
– A middle state between waking and dreaming.
– (Marginal note: Sleepwalkers.)

A. Dreams

What causes them?
a) External impressions:
– External stimuli—even though these do not produce the clarity of waking perception; they may produce a dim representation when deep sleep is ending, followed by a string of clearer representations.
– Burning sensations in the body—pleasant or painful—often produce terrifying images and fear.
b) Representations before falling asleep:
– Mental activity may be more lively than in deep sleep.
c) How the train of ideas is determined:

By the laws of association—leaps occur because memory fails. In waking life, such leaps may also be guided by passion or purpose, while reason is active, but in dreaming, reason is not active.

Often reason and judgment are still at work (in those who are accustomed to thinking)—even more effectively than in waking life (Johnson, scholars, Reinhold—pondering problems, unknown languages).

New sensations may give rise to leaps of imagination (e.g., a feather tickling the skin).

Confusion of imaginative representations with sensory sensations:
– External impressions are less vivid than in waking life, yet the soul is accustomed to judging by the degree of vividness (e.g., misconceptions about the nature of reality).
d) Consciousness of time, place, and preceding states—one may be aware of their temporal or spatial situation in the dream.
e) Consequences:

On the body: Often harmful (e.g., agitation, night terrors), but sometimes beneficial (e.g., a sick person’s fitful dreams).

On the faculty of cognition:
– Dreams may deceive the power of cognition.

On the faculty of desire:
– Dreams produce a stronger disposition in the economy of human nature: by relaxing bodily powers, the imagination can agitate the vital organs intensely, potentially extinguishing them.

On rare occasions, dreams may even presage waking behavior—certain behaviors in waking life (e.g., a timid person musters courage upon waking because their dream prepared them to do so).

II. Somnambulism (Sleepwalking)

A. Symptoms
– Imaginative representations are more vivid than sensory sensations and are often mistaken for real sensations—characteristic of mania.
– Often combined with hidden malicious intentions; rage with violent outbursts; melancholy with sorrowful thoughts; or simply madness.

B. Causes

Physical causes—without the soul’s cooperation—often a natural, inherited predisposition. In pregnancy, external bodies (poisonous herbs, mad dogs) may influence the developing brain. Disease matter in the body acts on the brain (e.g., smallpox infection).
In the soul:
a) An imaginative representation of such intensity—through excessive repetition or overly vivid mental presence—that sensory perceptions cannot compete, leading to passion (pride, infatuation, speculation). A single too-vivid sensation coupled with an idea (e.g., excessive joy) can escalate into madness.
b) Mania arises from:
1. Overexertion of the organs of thought—apprehending impressions differently than other people do; the imagination takes these mental movements to be sensory impressions; judgments may remain formally valid but arise from a disturbed mood.
2. Violent passions, unbridled indulgence of the senses. Most cases of mania involve three passions: pride, jealousy, and love—excessive satisfaction of the animal drive.

C. Remedy
– Primarily physical treatment, which often also affects the soul.
– In the early stages of mania, distraction can help (e.g., redirecting the patient’s attention).
– If one accepts that the illusion is a sensory one, one may attempt to remove its “phantom” by contradicting its imaginative basis (e.g., pretending one has horns—an exorcism of false impressions).
– Conditions such as carbuncles, glass in the foot, a small bell in the belly—“tricks” to dispel illusions and recover lost reason.
– One often can judge one’s illusions correctly in retrospect.

III. Premonitions and Presentiments

Drawing an inference from effect to cause, from sign to signified—yet here we speak of premonitions whose origin eludes any satisfactory explanation, even though they are confirmed by subsequent outcome (yet they do not always come true).

– A general experiential principle holds that the soul often has vivid representations of future matters without being able to account for them:

Some people, unaware of the swift comparison involved in their conclusion, merely have a result (e.g., during a dream, they assemble images, deliberate on ideas, link them in ways not done while awake—sensations in illness, or visions at one’s death). A disposition to perceive more clearly arises in somnambulism.

Often a presentiment functions like cause and effect: the idea of sickness or death becomes so vivid that it produces a weakened state or even actual “realization” of the event. Joyful premonitions: e.g., a mother who spares no effort to advance her son to honors, believing herself assured of his future success.

Chance—we remember only the vivacious premonitions that do not materialize, forgetting those that did come true, or blending in what we have read or heard into our recollection of the premonition—yet the faculty of premonition remains obscure in itself.

IV. Visionaries

– Visions consist solely in the organ of sight, yet occur in persons of sound mind—perceiving objects that no one else sees, or perceiving “sensibly” in general.
– Some convince themselves they are deceived; others think themselves demented, while a third class holds their visions as true.
– Causes
1. Physical: A defect in the eye (“optic illusion”) or a secret malady in the brain. Many people at a smaller scale experience phantasms of the senses—strained by fear or other passions, they “hang about” phantasms. Visual images are the easiest to reproduce. They are ordinarily vivid, yet held to be real.
– One may prepare the senses by exposing oneself to loud noises, ointments, or darkness; visionaries claim to commune with spirits of higher realms—often the deceived or the charlatan (e.g., Swedenborg).
– Optical illusion: Apparitions of ghosts—deception of the senses partly by sense impressions, partly by imagination:
a) True sensory impressions that the mind cannot immediately explain.
b) True sensory impressions distorted by imagination.
c) The sheer power of imagination, already filled with such images (e.g., cemeteries, battlefields, wounded and offended souls, one’s own conscience); the mind at certain locations where one delighted in life—murderers encountering the scene of their crime—recollections from life’s arrangements.

X) Focus on a Passionate State

– For the sake of distraction or intensification, all other impressions are neglected—unconnected to one another, linked only by their relation to the passion. Directed toward external objects, they invariably follow the course of the passion, dragging everything into its sphere. When two passions coexist, the linked representations alternate.

a) Focus on the state of reflection—connected with it; the essential representations arise rather than accidental ones.

(Marginal note: “In every person, certain ideas or relations have an efficacy; for each person these differ—one is more powerful than another—habit or natural disposition. In the unformed mind, impressions are accidental; in the formed mind, they pertain to cause and effect—here too, differences.”)

II. Causes of Revival of Representations: Hypotheses

a) Only in the brain, by mechanical causes
– One fiber may stimulate another, or one representation in the soul may evoke another, yet not immediately in the soul itself.

b) Reasons for…

Involuntary arousals of ideas—intoxication, fever, dreams—often an idea forces itself upon the mind against its will (as in hypochondria)—through incitement by bodily causes—often, however, certain states in the soul (e.g., sadness, hatred).
– With each representation, a neural movement in the brain is connected; these fibers become more excitable, so the soul is more inclined to awaken that idea repeatedly.
Weakening of memory—returns with restored health (e.g., a virtuoso with a failing instrument, due to a defect in the brain, cannot achieve clear consciousness).
Overpowering of ongoing trains of thought—interrupting or removing them:
– Through illness, sensory impressions can trigger representations in the soul, but not according to the laws of imagination.
– If, through illness or unnatural condition of the brain, the soul is prevented from interrupting or continuing its trains of representations at will, and from eliminating certain representations—then certain states of the brain make certain sensations active, and idea-trains follow the soul’s associative laws.

III. What Causes the Soul to Awaken Certain Ideas or Trains of Ideas?

a) Sensory impressions—especially visual and auditory representations.
b) Bodily states—e.g., blood rushing to the chest in fear.
c) Absence of external objects—lack of certain bodily motions—thus blocking certain ideas.

IV. Nature of the Revived Representations

A. Distinction from Sensory Representations
– Through weakness: The idea of the absence of the object is combined with the sensory representation of its presence.
a) It can happen that an imaginative representation has just as great a degree of vividness; the soul is insufficiently reflective—confuses them.
– Fever paroxysm—delirium; a visionary by nature has a strong imagination, amplified further by external means (e.g., children wet the bed).
– Reflecting upon one’s dreams in waking life generates terrifying imaginative representations.

b) Sensory representations are weaker, relatively, than imaginative ones—hence dreams. There is no universal criterion. In each person, a sensory representation has a particular relation to its imaginative counterpart—one that the understanding cannot determine.

c) Consequences
– In fever or aberrant constitution of the brain, the soul is unable to interrupt or continue at will its trains of representations, or to eliminate certain representations—leading to mania.
– Certain states of the brain make certain sensations active; then idea-trains follow their own associative laws.

V. Consequences of Revived Representations

a) In the soul: The state that once accompanied them returns.
b) In the body:

Involuntary movement typically accompanies that representation.
Voluntary movement may also accompany it—e.g., a musician or hunter practicing certain physical sequences linked to a representation (such as playing the piano).

C. I. Recollection – Recognition

Comparing and distinguishing a present impression with a former one—being conscious that the present representation is identical to one already had.

Difference from mere power of reproduction:
a) A reproduced representation may exist without the consciousness of “this is the same as before.”
b) The power of recollection (Errinnerungsvermögen) is at work not only with revived representations but also with actual sensations.
c) Recollection is effective even when the power of reproduction is incapable (e.g., when sensory pathways are blocked).

II. Rules for Recollection

a) Clarity of consciousness regarding the sensation to be recalled—e.g., reflecting on a passage in a book.
b) Circumstantial conditions that facilitate revival—external cues.
– Lapses in memory: often only simple faculties or mechanical causes explain recall (e.g., a change in feeling from an earlier fever).

D. Creative (Poetic) Faculty (Dichtungsvermögen)

The capacity to produce representations that differ in size, quality, and arrangement from those previously held:

a) Reorganizing images in an entirely different order, position, or proportion—imagining the parts first.
b) Separating or combining elements of a sensation (as a painter would).
c) Expansion and diminution—creating something grand or sublime.
d) General images—sensory abstractions—merging like elements into a new composite—analysis or synthesis of simple or composite representations.
– Imagination may operate involuntarily or under the direction of understanding and reason.
– Certain powers of reproduction are not compatible with creative power.

Application to states in which imagination is involved:
– Dreams
– Somnambulism (sleepwalking)
– Delirium (mania)
– Premonitions and visions

I. Dreaming

a) Difference from Waking
– Representations are dim, yet often vivid.
– Haller: Inability to move or perceive clearly despite healthy organs—bodily fatigue leads to lack of clear outer sensation.
– Various kinds of sleep:
– Deep sleep: No later recall; all voluntary movements and all external sensations are absent.
– Dream-sleep: A series of representations of the soul is present; one can think about and recall them consciously—they are all imagination, not genuine sensory perceptions, often without any bodily movement.
– Somnambulism (sleepwalking):
• Voluntary, more animated movements are produced, and clearer sensations may be obtained from some senses (e.g., a sleepwalker performing complex tasks).
• A middle state between waking and dreaming.

(Marginal note: Sleepwalkers.)

A) Dreams

a) What causes them?

External sensations:
– Stimulation by external objects—though lacking the clarity of waking perception, such stimuli may produce dim impressions as deep sleep ends, leading to a sequence of sharper representations.
– Burning or pricking in the body—pleasant or unpleasant—can produce terrifying images and fear.
Representations before falling asleep:
– Mental activity may be more lively than in deep sleep—one’s life-spirits are more active.
What determines the sequence of ideas?
a. Associative laws—leaps occur because memory fails. In waking life, leaps may also be guided by passions or purpose, while reason is active; in dreams, reason is not active.
b. Often reason and judgment function in dreamers accustomed to thinking—sometimes even more effectively than in waking life (e.g., Johnson, scholars, Reinhold—puzzling over problems or unknown languages).
c. New sensations generate leaps of imagination (e.g., a bed feather tickling the skin).
d) Confusion of imaginative representations with sensory sensations:
– External impressions are less vivid than in waking life, yet the soul judges by vividness—leading to misapprehension of reality.

B) What are the consequences?

For the body: Often detrimental (e.g., agitated states, night terrors), but sometimes beneficial (e.g., in the sick).
For the power of cognition: Dreams may deceive the power of knowledge.
For the power of desire: Dreams can produce a stronger disposition within the economy of human nature—by relaxing bodily faculties, the imagination can intensely stimulate the vital organs, even extinguishing vital forces.
On rare occasions, dreams may influence waking behavior: Preparatory influence leading to greater confidence upon awakening.

II. Somnambulism (Sleepwalking)

a) Presentation
– Imaginative representations are more vivid than sensory sensations and may be mistaken for them—characteristic of mania.
– Often combined with hidden malice or violent tendencies; rage producing wild outbursts; melancholy associated with sorrowful thoughts or madness.

b) Causes

Physical causes—independent of the will—often an inherited predisposition. In pregnancy, external substances (poisonous herbs, rabid animals) may affect the fetus’s brain. Disease matter in the body (e.g., smallpox) acts on the brain.
In the soul:
a. An imaginative representation of such intensity—through excessive repetition or overly vivid mental presence—that sensory impressions cannot compete, resulting in passion (e.g., pride, infatuation, speculative frenzy). A single too-vivid sensation combined with an idea (excessive joy) can culminate in madness.
b. Mania arises from:
1. Overstrain of the organs of thought—perceiving impressions differently than others; the imagination interprets these movements as sensory impressions. Judgments may remain formally correct yet arise from a disordered mood.
2. Intense passions and unbridled indulgence of the senses. Most cases of mania involve three chief passions: pride, jealousy, and love—excessive gratification of the animal drive.

C) Remedy
– Primarily physical treatment, which often also affects the soul.
– In early mania, distraction (diversion of the mind) can help.
– If one accepts that the image is merely sensory, one can dispel its phantom by contradicting its imaginative basis—e.g., planting false ideas (“You have horns!”) or irritating a carbuncle, putting glass in the foot, a tiny bell in the stomach—to dispel illusions and recover lost reason.
– Often, one can judge one’s illusions correctly afterward.

III. Premonitions and Presentiments

Drawing an inference from effect to cause, from a sign to that which is signified—yet here we speak of premonitions whose origin we cannot satisfactorily explain, even though they are confirmed by subsequent events (though they do not always come to pass).

– A general empirical principle holds that the soul often has vivid images of future matters without being able to account for them:

The thinker is often unaware of the rapid comparison leading to the conclusion; only the “result” is present (e.g., in dreams, one assembles images, contemplates ideas, links them in ways not done while awake; sensations during illness or at death). A disposition to perceive more clearly arises in somnambulism.

Premonition as instinct of cause and effect: The idea of disease or death becomes so vivid that it produces decay or actual realization of the event. Likewise, joyful premonitions are possible—e.g., a mother who spares no effort to see her son honored.

Chance: We often recall only the vivid premonitions that did not come true, forgetting those that did—mixing what we have heard or read into the recollection of the premonition, so that the faculty itself remains obscure.

IV. Visionaries

– “Visions” occur purely through the eye, yet in persons of sound understanding—perceiving objects that no one else sees, or perceiving through the senses at large.
– Some visionaries recognize themselves as mistaken; others believe themselves besotted, while still others insist on the reality of their visions.
– Causes
1. Physical: A defect in the eye (optical illusion) or a latent disease in the brain. Many people, on a smaller scale, experience phantasms—forced by fear or other passions, they “hang about” imaginary figures. Visual images are easiest to reproduce and are ordinarily vivid; visionaries take them to be real.
– One may prepare the senses by exposure to loud noises, the use of ointments, or darkness; contact with graves or battlefields may fill one with vivid images of wounded or offended souls, or of one’s own conscience. A visionary may claim to commune with higher spirits—often a deceiver or a fanatic (e.g., Swedenborg).
– Optical illusions and ghostly apparitions—deception of the senses partly by illusion, partly by the imagination:
a) True sensory impressions that the mind cannot immediately explain.
b) True sensations distorted by the imagination.
c) The sheer force of an imagination already full of such images: cemeteries, battlefields, the offended and their wrath, one’s own conscience, a place in which one enjoyed life, a site of one’s crimes.

(marginal note: Ghostly apparitions—deception of the senses and of the imagination; genuine sensory impressions priorly accepted—when we cannot immediately explain something; or true sensations distorted by the imagination; or the imagination’s influence—KM)

** – End of Text 27 –**

Marginal Notes (summarized):

“The soul must first be known by listing its parts—then only, after examining whether our reason is capable of such a concept, is it possible, since the concept of rational psychology lies in no experience at all!”
“Things in themselves—absolute subject—the concept of reason—cognition itself—the pure science of the forms of the soul’s faculties, i.e., that which the soul actively produces when knowing or desiring.”
“From the perspective of each faculty—whether the soul’s changes are not all mere semblance, as though the sun revolved around things in themselves.”
“Our sensory faculty must conform to the constitution of our power of intuition; concepts aligned with objects must accord with the laws of my understanding. Cognition through reason (“which demands the unconditioned”) would contradict itself if we assumed we could know things in themselves via sensibility and understanding.”
“How do the nerves become instruments of sensation? Fluid? Vibration? Membranes?”
“The brain is not naturally predisposed to receive changes of the soul; the soul cannot act by itself to implant traces.”
“Representations may follow one another in the soul against its will.”
“There is an art to seeing—every craft, every science has its own sensitivity that perceives more than others, by means of distinguishing concepts.”
“Visual impressions: one can distinguish partial images. Smell and taste do not readily form mixtures. Content: visual and tactile impressions awaken the concept of space; others are connected only afterward. Feelings of modifications within ourselves—at most that the object is distinct from us.”
“Sleepwalkers.”
“Certain behaviors wake the sleeper to safer conduct—one must be cautious about interrupting a sleepwalker.”
“Magnetic sleep: clearer sensations, weaker sensations—mental faculties increased even in the sleepwalker and the dreamer.”
“Ghostly apparitions—deception of the senses; sometimes true sensory impressions that can be distorted by imagination, or purely the imagination’s effect.”
“Common experience: the soul often has vivid representations of future events without explanation.”

[work in progress…]

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Early Writings I

Table of Contents

Diary

Works from the Gymnasium Years:An Essay from the Tübingen Seminary

Four Sermons

Studies

It cannot be denied…

Psychology

A) External Sense, B) Internal Sense

A. External Sense

II. Different Kinds: A. The Main Categories

A. In What Ways Do These Senses Differ from One Another?

II. Inner Sense

Imagination (Phantasie)

I. Retention (Memory)

C. Laws of Retention of Representations

B. Revival of Representations

I. According to Which Laws

a) Particular (Special) Laws

b) General Law

c) Why, of several representations linked by coexistence or succession, do only certain ones awaken one another and not others?

C. False (Pseudo-) Memory and Creative (Poetic) Imagination

I. Fine Distinction from Sensory Representations

B. Relation to Other Representations

V. Consequences of Revival of a Representation

C. I. Recollection – Recognition

II. Rules for Recollection

D. Creative (Poetic) Faculty (Dichtungsvermögen)

I. Dreaming

II. Somnambulism (Sleepwalking)

III. Premonitions and Presentiments

IV. Visionaries

X) Focus on a Passionate State

II. Causes of Revival of Representations: Hypotheses

III. What Causes the Soul to Awaken Certain Ideas or Trains of Ideas?

IV. Nature of the Revived Representations

V. Consequences of Revived Representations

C. I. Recollection – Recognition

II. Rules for Recollection

D. Creative (Poetic) Faculty (Dichtungsvermögen)

I. Dreaming

A) Dreams

II. Somnambulism (Sleepwalking)

III. Premonitions and Presentiments

IV. Visionaries

Marginal Notes (summarized):

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Works from the Gymnasium Years:
An Essay from the Tübingen Seminary