Johann Gottlieb Fichte

“ If none has been handed down to such a man, he is to be pitied. But he to whom a fatherland has been handed down, and in whose soul heaven and earth, visible and invisible meet and mingle, and thus, and only thus, create a true and enduring heaven—such a man fights to the last drop of his blood to hand on the precious possession unimpaired to his posterity. ”

“ But peace will only be disturbed by the continuance of the struggle. They will, therefore, do anything just to put an end to the fighting, and the sooner the better; they will submit, they will yield; and why should they not? All they have ever been concerned about, and all they have ever hoped from life, has been the continuation of the habit of existing under tolerable conditions. The promise of a life here on earth extending beyond the period of life here on earth—that alone it is which can inspire men even unto death for the fatherland. ”

“ These addresses lay before you the sole remaining means, now that the others have been tried in vain, of preventing this annihilation of every nobler impulse that may break out among us in the future, and of preventing this degradation of our whole nation. They propose that you establish deeply and indelibly in the hearts of all, by means of education, the true and all-powerful love of fatherland, the conception of our people as an eternal people and as the security for our own eternity. ”

“ Love that is truly love, and not a mere transitory lust, never clings to what is transient; only in the eternal does it awaken and become kindled, and there alone does it rest. Man is not able to love even himself unless he conceives himself as eternal; apart from that he cannot even respect, much less approve of, himself. Still less can he love anything outside himself without taking it up into the eternity of his faith and of his soul and binding it thereto. ”

“ They did not all die; they did not see slavery; they bequeathed freedom to their children. It is their unyielding resistance which the whole modern world has to thank for being what it now is. Had the Romans succeeded in bringing them also under the yoke and in destroying them as a nation, which the Roman did in every case, the whole development of the human race would have taken a different course, a course that one cannot think would have been more satisfactory. ”

“ Picture to yourselves, then, the new power, which we are presupposing, as well-disposed and as benevolent as ever you may wish; make it as good as God Himself; will you be able to impart to it divine understanding as well? Even though it wish in all earnestness the greatest happiness and well-being of everyone, do you suppose that the greatest well-being it is able to conceive will be the same thing as German well-being? ”

“ The natural impulse of man, which should be abandoned only in case of real necessity, is to find heaven on this earth, and to endow his daily work on earth with permanence and eternity; to plant and to cultivate the eternal in the temporal—not merely in an incomprehensible fashion or in a connection with the eternal that seems to mortal eye an impenetrable gulf, but in a fashion visible to the mortal eye itself. ”

“ Not the spirit of the peaceful citizen’s love for the constitution and the laws, but the devouring flame of higher patriotism, which embraces the nation as the vesture of the eternal, for which the noble-minded man joyfully sacrifices himself, and the ignoble man, who only exists for the sake of the other, must likewise sacrifice himself. ”

“ Such a nation—if a nation could exist in which there were not even a few men of noble mind to make an exception to the general rule—would in fact need no freedom at all, for this is needed only for the higher purposes that transcend the State. It needs only to be tamed and trained, so that the individuals may live peaceably with each other and that the whole may be made into an efficient instrument for arbitrary purposes in which the nation as such has no part. ”

“ Although it is true that religion is, for one thing, the consolation of the unjustly oppressed slave, yet this above all is the mark of a religious disposition, viz., to fight against slavery and, as far as possible, to prevent religion from sinking into a mere consolation for captives. No doubt it suits the tyrant well to preach religious resignation and to bid those look to heaven to whom he allows not the smallest place on earth. ”

“ Wherever the German language was spoken, everyone who had first seen the light of day in its domain could consider himself as in a double sense a citizen, on the one hand, of the State where he was born and to whose care he was in the first instance commended, and, on the other hand, of the whole common fatherland of the German nation. To everyone it was permitted to seek out for himself in the whole length and breadth of this fatherland the culture most congenial to him or the sphere of action to which his spirit was best adapted ”

“ These men, and all others of like mind in the history of the world, won the victory because eternity inspired them, and this inspiration always does, and always must, defeat him who is not so inspired. It is neither the strong right arm nor the efficient weapon that wins victories, but only the power of the soul. He who sets a limit to his sacrifices, and has no wish to venture beyond a certain point, ceases to resist as soon as he finds himself in danger at this point, even though it be one which is vital to him and which ought not to be surrendered. ”

“ Wherever there has been true government, wherever bitter struggles have been endured, wherever victory has been won in the face of mighty opposition, there it has been that promise of eternal life which governed and struggled and won the victory. Believing in that promise the German Protestants, already mentioned in these addresses, entered upon the struggle. Do you think they did not know that peoples could be governed by that old belief too, and held together in law and order, and that under the old belief men could procure a comfortable existence? ”

“ Whether this can be said with truth of any nation at all we may leave undecided; this much is clear, that an original people needs freedom, that this is the security for its continuance as an original people, and that, as it goes on, it is able to stand an ever-increasing degree of freedom without the slightest danger. This is the first matter in respect of which love of fatherland must govern the State itself. ”

“ He who does not first regard himself as eternal has in him no love of any kind, and, moreover, cannot love a fatherland, a thing which for him does not exist. He who regards his invisible life as eternal, but not his visible life as similarly eternal, may perhaps have a heaven and therein a fatherland, but here below he has no fatherland, for this, too, is regarded only in the image of eternity—eternity visible and made sensuous—and for this reason also he is unable to love his fatherland. ”

“ That law determines entirely and completes what has been called the national character of a people—that law of the development of the original and divine. From this it is clear that men who, as is the case with what we have described as the foreign spirit, do not believe at all in something original nor in its continuous development, but only in an eternal recurrence of apparent life, and who by their belief become what they believe, are in the higher sense not a people at all. As they in fact, properly speaking, do not exist, they are just as little capable of having a national character. ”

“ Anyone who, because of the turn taken by his own development, became out of harmony with his immediate environment, easily found a willing reception elsewhere, found new friends in place of those he had lost, found time and leisure to make his meaning plainer and perhaps to win over and to reconcile even those who were offended with him, and so to unite the whole. No German-born prince ever took upon himself to mark out for his subjects as their fatherland, with mountains or rivers as boundaries, the territory over which he ruled, and to regard his subjects as bound to the soil. ”

“ What inspired the men of noble mind among the Romans, whose frame of mind and way of thinking still live and breathe among us in their works of art, to struggles and sacrifices, to patience and endurance for the fatherland? ”

“ It has happened that nations have been told to their face that they do not need so much freedom as many other nations do. It may even be that the form in which the opinion is expressed is considerate and mild, if what is really meant is that the particular nation would be quite unable to stand so much freedom, and that nothing but extreme severity could prevent its members from destroying each other. But, when the words are taken as meaning what they say, they are true only on the supposition that such a nation is thoroughly incapable of having original life or even the impulse towards it. ”

“ In the maintenance of the traditional constitution, the laws, and civil prosperity there is absolutely no real true life and no original decision. Conditions and circumstances, and legislators perhaps long since dead, have created these things; succeeding ages go on faithfully in the paths marked out, and so in fact they have no public life of their own; they merely repeat a life that once existed. In such times there is no need of any real government. ”

“ Even if one is firmly persuaded that all our effort on this earth will not leave the slightest trace behind it nor yield the slightest fruit, nay more, that the divine effort will even be perverted and become an instrument of evil and of still deeper moral corruption, one can none the less continue the effort, solely in order to maintain the divine life that has manifested itself in us, and with a view to a higher order of things in a future world, in which no deed that is of divine origin is lost. ”

“ What man of noble mind is there who does not earnestly wish to relive his own life in a new and better way in his children and his children’s children, and to continue to live on this earth, ennobled and perfected in their lives, long after he is dead? ”

“ His belief and his struggle to plant what is permanent, his conception in which he comprehends his own life as an eternal life, is the bond which unites first his own nation, and then, through his nation, the whole human race, in a most intimate fashion with himself, and brings all their needs within his widened sympathy until the end of time. ”

“ Even in the period of their boldest flights of political creation, was there a single one who demanded more from the State than the abolition of inequalities, the maintenance of peace within their borders and of national reputation without, or, in the extremest case, domestic bliss? If, as we must conclude from all these indications, this is their highest good, they will not attribute to us any higher needs or any higher demands on life. ”

“ What man of noble mind is there who does not want to scatter, by action or thought, a grain of seed for the unending progress in perfection of his race, to fling something new and unprecedented into time, that it may remain there and become the inexhaustible source of new creations? ”

“ The latter is well said, for, so long as he sees that thou still hast a cloke, he seeks to pick a quarrel with thee so as to take this from thee also, and only when thou art quite naked wilt thou escape his attention and be left in peace. To such a man the earth becomes a hell and a place of horror, just because of his higher mind, which does him honour. He wishes he had never been born; he wishes that his eyes may be closed to the light of day, and the sooner the better ”

“ A people that is capable of firmly beholding the countenance of that vision from the spiritual world, independence, even though it be only its highest representatives and leaders who are capable of perceiving it—a people capable of being possessed by love of this vision, as our earliest forefathers were, will undoubtedly win the victory over a people that is used, as were the Roman armies, only as the tool of foreign ambition to bring independent people under the yoke ”

“ Now, I challenge all those who are acquainted with the modern literature of foreign countries to show me one of their poets or legislators who in recent times has ever betrayed a glimmering of anything similar to the view that regards the human race as eternally progressing, and that refers all its activities in this world solely to this eternal progress. ”

“ From all this it follows that the State, merely as the government of human life in its progress along the ordinary peaceful path, is not something which is primary and which exists for its own sake, but is merely the means to the higher purpose of the eternal, regular, and continuous development of what is purely human in this nation. ”

“ Whatever turn events may take, since it pays to govern they will always have a ruler over them. Suppose the new ruler even wants to introduce slavery (and what is slavery if not the disregard for, and suppression of, the characteristic of an original people?—but to that way of thinking such qualities do not exist) , suppose he wants to introduce slavery. Then, since it is profitable to preserve the life of slaves, to maintain their numbers and even their well-being, slavery under him will turn out to be bearable if he is anything of a calculator. ”

“ It is they whom we must thank—we, the immediate heirs of their soil, their language, and their way of thinking—for being Germans still, for being still borne along on the stream of original and independent life. ”

“ If we have hitherto proceeded correctly in the course of our investigation, it must here be obvious at once that only the German—the original man, who has not become dead in an arbitrary organization—really has a people and is entitled to count on one, and that he alone is capable of real and rational love for his nation. ”

“ It is a gross misuse of religion, a misuse of which Christianity among other religions has frequently been guilty, to make a point of recommending, on principle and without regard to existing circumstances, such a withdrawal from the affairs of the State and the nation as the mark of a true religious disposition. ”