Johann Gottlieb Fichte

“ Centuries have come and gone since you were last convoked as you are to-day; in such numbers; in a cause so great, so urgent, and of such concern to all and everyone; so entirely as a nation and as Germans. Never again will the offer come to you in this way. If you now take no heed and withdraw into yourselves, if you again let these addresses go by you as if they were meant merely to tickle your ears, or if you regard them as something strange and fabulous, then no human being will ever take you into account again. ”

“ With proud self-reliance it may say to you: you rule over peoples more loyal, more docile, more worthy of happiness than any princes have ever ruled over in any age or any nation. They have a sense of freedom and a capacity for it; but they followed you into a bloody war against what seemed to them freedom, because you willed it. Some among you willed otherwise later, and they followed you into what must have seemed to them a war of extirpation against one of the last remnants of German independence and autonomy, again because you willed it so. ”

“ In ancient times there was such a people in existence, equipped with every requirement for such a destiny and quite well known to the civilized people, who have left us their description of it; and they themselves, if they had been able to imagine their own downfall, would have been able to discover in this people the means of reconstruction. To us also the whole surface of the globe is quite well known and all the peoples that dwell thereon. But do we know a people akin to the ancestral stock of the modern world, of whom we may have the same expectation? ”

“ All ages, all wise and good men who have ever breathed upon this earth, all their thoughts and intuitions of something loftier, mingle with these voices and surround you and lift up imploring hands to you; even, if one may say so, providence and the divine plan in creating a race of men, a plan which exists only to be thought out by men and to be brought by men into the actual world—the divine plan, I say, solemnly appeals to you to save its honour and its existence. ”

“ Then, too, there mingle with these voices the spirits of your more recent forefathers, those who fell in the holy war for the freedom of belief and of religion. “Save our honour too,” they cry to you. “To us it was not entirely clear what we fought for; besides the lawful resolve not to let ourselves be dictated to by external force in matters of conscience, there was another and a higher spirit driving us, which never fully revealed itself to us. To you it is revealed, this spirit, if you have the power of vision in the spiritual world; it beholds you with eyes clear and sublime. ”

“ As the next generation that proceeds from you turns out to be, so will your reputation be in history; honourable, if they bear honourable witness for you, but disgraceful even beyond your due, if your descendants may not speak for you, and the conqueror makes your history. Never yet has a conqueror had sufficient inclination or sufficient knowledge to judge the conquered justly. The more he depreciates them, the more just does he himself stand out. ”

“ I, who have long ceased to belong to your ranks, am of the opinion, which I have expressed in these addresses, that you are even more capable than others of any thought that lies outside the common round, and more susceptible to all that is good and vigorous, because your age lies nearer to the years of childlike innocence and of nature. Quite otherwise is this trait in you regarded by the majority of the older world. They accuse you of arrogance, of hasty and presumptuous judgment exceeding your powers, of always thinking yourselves in the right, of a mania for innovation. ”

“ What gives you alone of all German men and writers the special task, the vocation, and the right to assemble us and press your views upon us? Would not each one of the thousands of Germany’s men of letters have just as much right to it as you? ”

“ This good hope which they have of you is not based on thin air; they have found it confirmed in their own person. They must confess that in the days of their foolish youth they dreamed of improving the world, just as you do now; nevertheless, as they grew more mature they became as tame and peaceful as you see them at present. I believe them; I have myself, even in my own not very long experience, seen young men, who at first aroused other hopes, none the less at a later stage fully come up to the well-meaning expectations of this age of maturity. ”

“ It is true that the degree of evil, be it greater or less, which will befall us may depend partly on that unknown power; but it will depend very specially on the understanding and goodwill of those to whom we are subjected. But whether it will ever go well with us again depends entirely on ourselves; and it is certain that no well-being whatever will come to us again unless we procure it for ourselves, and especially unless each one of us, in his own way, acts and works as if he were alone, and as if upon him alone depended the salvation of generations to come. ”

“ If you perish in this your essential nature, then there perishes together with you every hope of the whole human race for salvation from the depths of its miseries. Do not console yourselves with an opinion based on thin air and depending on the mere recurrence of cases that have already happened; do not hope that when the old civilization has fallen a new one will arise once more out of a semi-barbarous nation on the ruins of the first. ”

“ In such a life experience does not reconcile itself to evil, but only makes clearer the means, and brings more skill in the art, of fighting evil triumphantly. For the deterioration due to increasing age, the times we live in are solely to blame; such deterioration must be the result wherever society is very corrupt. It is not nature that corrupts us; nature creates us in innocence; society corrupts us. He who once surrenders himself to its influence must in the nature of things become worse and worse, the longer he is exposed to this influence. ”

“ It depends on you whether you want to be the end, and to be the last of a generation unworthy of respect and certain to be despised by posterity even beyond its due—a generation of whose history (if, indeed, there can be any history in the barbarism that will then begin) your descendants will read the end with gladness, saying that its fate was just; or whether you want to be the beginning and the point of development for a new age glorious beyond all your conceptions, and the generation from whom posterity will reckon the year of their salvation. ”

“ The old world with its glory and its greatness, as well as its defects, has fallen by its own unworthiness and by the violence of your fathers. If there is truth in what has been expounded in these addresses, then are you of all modern peoples the one in whom the seed of human perfection most unmistakably lies, and to whom the lead in its development is committed. ”

“ What is demanded of you is not much. You are only bidden to undertake to pull yourselves together for a short time, and to think over that which lies immediately and openly before your eyes. On that alone you are to form a definite opinion, to remain true to it, and utter and express it in your own immediate surroundings. It is an assumption, it is our sure conviction, that the result of this thinking will prove to be the same with all of you, and that, if only you really think and do not go on in the old heedlessness, you will think alike ”

“ If you continue in your dullness and helplessness, all the evils of serfdom are awaiting you; deprivations, humiliations, the scorn and arrogance of the conqueror; you will be driven and harried in every corner, because you are in the wrong and in the way everywhere; until, by the sacrifice of your nationality and your language, you have purchased for yourselves some subordinate and petty place, and until in this way you gradually die out as a people. ”

“ The varied and confused mixture of sensuous and spiritual motives that has hitherto ruled the world shall be displaced, and spirit alone, pure and freed from all sensuous motives, shall take the helm of human affairs. It was in order that this spirit might have freedom to develop and grow to independent existence—it was for this that we poured forth our blood. ”

“ Your share in bringing about the fate that has befallen you together with your peoples has been stated here in the mildest and, we believe, the only just and equitable way; and unless you are willing to listen to flattery only, but never to the truth, you can have no complaint to make against these addresses. Let all this be forgotten, in the same way that all the rest of us wish that our share of the blame may be forgotten. For you too, as for all of us, a new life now begins. ”

“ Seeing that this is so, you shall now not conquer them with temporal weapons; your spirit alone shall rise up against them and stand erect. To you has fallen the greater destiny, to found the empire of the spirit and of reason, and completely to annihilate the rule of brute physical force in the world. ”

“ If our race dies out with you, our honour will be turned to shame and our wisdom to foolishness. For if, indeed, the German stock is to be swallowed up in Roman civilization, it were better that it had fallen before the Rome of old than before a Rome of to-day. ”

“ Yea, in all nations there are still some souls who cannot even yet believe that the great promises of a realm of justice, reason, and truth for the human race are vain and naught but a baseless delusion, and who, therefore, assume that the present age of iron is but a transition to a better state. These souls, and in them the whole of modern humanity, count upon you. A large part of modern humanity is descended from us, and the rest have received from us their religion and all their civilization. ”

“ But if, on the contrary, each one, leaving himself out, puts his hope in the rest and leaves the matter to others, then there will be no others, and all together will remain as they were before. Make it on the spot, this resolution. Do not say: “Let us rest a little longer, let us sleep and dream a little longer, till the improvement comes of itself.” It will never come of itself. He who has once let yesterday go by, which would have been a more convenient time for reflection, and yet cannot use his will to-day, will be still less able to do so to-morrow. ”

“ If you could only observe them without their knowing it; if you could only escape from that environment, which does not always present the loveliest aspect of humanity to you, and descend into the houses of the citizen and the cottages of the peasant, there to follow and reflect upon the quiet and secluded life of these classes of society, with whom the qualities of loyalty and uprightness, so rare now among the upper classes, seem to have taken refuge; O, then, beyond a doubt you would be filled with a resolve to think more earnestly than ever how help might be brought to them. ”

“ They are willing to pardon you, these addresses, on the assumption that you had not grasped the importance of your business; they solemnly appeal to you to make yourselves acquainted from this very hour with its importance, and no longer to carry it on as if it were merely a trade. Learn to respect yourselves, show by your actions that you do so, and the world will respect you. The first proof of it you will give by the influence you yourselves exert on the resolution that is here proposed, and by the way in which you conduct yourselves in connection therewith. ”

“ In and by that clear thinking maintain the source of the eternal bloom of youth; however much your body may grow old or your knees tremble, your mind will re-create itself in ever-renewed freshness, and your character will stand fast and upright. Embrace at once the opportunity that here presents itself to you; think clearly over the subject that is proffered to you for reflection; the clearness that has dawned for you on this one point will gradually spread itself over all the others too.
222. These addresses appeal solemnly to you, old men. You have just heard what people think of you ”

“ Nevertheless, between the idea and the act of introducing it into every separate form of life there lies a great gulf. To fill up this gulf is not only the work of the man of affairs, who indeed must previously have learnt enough to be able to understand you, but the work also of you, who in the world of thought must not forget life. ”

“ These addresses appeal solemnly to you, princes of Germany. Those who in their dealings with you act as if no one ought to say anything whatever to you, or could have occasion to say anything, are contemptible flatterers; they wickedly slander you and no one else; put them far from you. The truth is that you are born just as ignorant as all the rest of us, and that you must listen and learn just as we must, if you are to emerge from this state of natural ignorance. ”