Robert Adamson

“ Think that with my voice there are mingled the voices of your ancestors from the far-off ages of grey antiquity, of those who stemmed with their own bodies the tide of Roman domination over the world, who vindicated with their own blood the independence of those mountains, plains, and streams which under you have been suffered to fall a prey to the stranger. They call to you,—‘Take ye our place’—hand down our memory to future ages, honourable and spotless as it has come down to you, as you have gloried in it and in your descent from us. ”

“ Even the stranger in foreign lands pleads with you, in so far as he understands himself, and knows aright his own interest. Yes! there are in every nation minds who can never believe that the great promises to the human race of a kingdom of law, of reason, of truth, are vain and idle delusions, and who therefore cherish the conviction that the present iron age is but a step towards a better state. These, and with them all the after-ages of humanity, trust in you. Many of them trace their lineage from us; others have received from us religion and all other culture. ”

“ An indescribable enthusiasm, hardly to be restrained from premature and fatal outbreak, agitated the whole people. The nation and the army, in the most eager excitement, waited with impatience for some movement on the part of their sovereign. The wisest and most prudent heads perceived how necessary it was for the future of Prussia and of Germany that their deliverance should not be left passively to the exertions of the Russian power. Only by vigorous and united action could Prussia hope to regain her position among the Powers of Europe. ”

“ After a stormy sea-voyage he reached Copenhagen, where he was greeted with warm affection by his former scholar Oersted, now a brilliant and successful professor at the Danish university. Not till August 1807 did he return to Berlin.
The calamities of Prussia had drawn the attention of all her greatest thinkers to the causes of such an unexpected collapse. With the instinctive feeling of a great nation still full of vital power, it was seen that regeneration was as possible as it was necessary, but that such regeneration must spring from a united and purified national spirit. ”

“ All ages,—all the wise and good who have ever breathed the air of this world of ours,—all their thoughts and aspirations towards a higher good,—mingle with these voices and encompass you about and raise suppliant hands towards you;—Providence itself, if we may venture so to speak, and the Divine plan in the creation of a human race—which indeed exists only that it may be understood of men, and by men be wrought into reality—plead with you to save their honour and their existence. ”

“ Whether those who have believed that humanity must ever advance in a course of ceaseless improvement, and that the great ideas of its order and worth were not empty dreams but the prophetic announcement and pledge of their future realisation;—whether those—or they who have slumbered on in the sluggish indolence of a mere vegetable or animal existence, and mocked every aspiration towards a higher world—have had the right,—this is the question upon which it has fallen to your lot to furnish a last and decisive answer. ”

“ The true function of a university, according to the ‘Deduced Plan,’ has not been in general rightly apprehended. It is not the communication of knowledge by means of lectures, for, were this the aim, university work would be better performed by a large collection of books. The university is the crown or apex of the system of education, whereby the whole powers of the individual are to be trained to their highest form of exercise. A university is, in brief, a school for training in the art of using the understanding scientifically. ”

“ But as matters now are with you, seek not to conquer with bodily weapons, but stand firm and erect before them in spiritual dignity. Yours is the greater destiny, to found an empire of mind and reason—to destroy the dominion of rude physical power as the ruler of the world. ”

“ The ancient world, with all its nobility and greatness, has fallen—through its own unworthiness and through the might of your forefathers. If there has been truth in that which I have spoken to you in these ‘Addresses,’ then it is you to whom, out of all other modern nations, the germs of human perfection are especially committed, and on whom the foremost place in the onward advance towards their development is conferred. ”

“ A united Germany would be the best safeguard against the evils of the artificial “balance of power” policy, which for long had been the bane of the German States. It might resist the evil pressure of international commerce, which makes the poorer country a natural prey for the more wealthy. Above all things, the unique richness and depth of the German character are a sufficient demonstration of the folly of these dreams of universal monarchy, which can be realised only at the cost of national individuality. ”

“ Hitherto our struggle has been deemed noble, great, and wise;—we have been looked upon as the consecrated and inspired ones of a Divine World-plan. Should our race perish with you, then will our honour be changed into dishonour, our wisdom into folly. ”

“ Those plead with us, by the common soil of our Fatherland, the cradle of their infancy, which they have left to us free; these, by the culture which they have accepted from us as the pledge of a higher good,—to maintain, for their sakes, the proud position which has hitherto been ours, to guard with jealous watchfulness against even the possible disappearance, from the great confederation of a newly arisen humanity, of that member which is to them more important than all others ”

“ Never has a victor been known to have either the inclination or the means of passing a just judgment on the subdued. The more he degrades them, the better does he justify his own position. Who can know what great deeds, what excellent institutions, what noble manners of many nations of antiquity, may have passed away into oblivion, because their succeeding generations have been enslaved, and have left the conqueror in his own way, and without contradiction, to tell their story? ”

“ Not otherwise than by a new system of national education, a system which shall have as its aim the perfection of the moral nature of the individual, and which shall at every step draw closer the links that bind the individual to the community. The groundwork of such a new education had already been laid by a deep-thinking German, by Pestalozzi; and the salvation of the people is to be looked for in the universal adoption and earnest realisation of what is true and original in his methods. ”

“ In Berlin, as in Weimar, the leaders and directors of the new romantic school were in truth the women who stood in such close and ambiguous relation to the better-known men of letters. Henrietta Herz, Dorothea Veit, and Karoline Schelling, were the most potent factors in the disturbed chaotic movements of the literature of the time; and the dismal quarrellings and bickerings of men like Schlegel, Schleiermacher, and Schelling, can only be understood when their relations to these leaders are taken into account. ”

“ If you sink to nothing in this your peculiar office, then with you the hopes of Humanity for salvation out of all its evils are likewise overthrown. Hope not, console not yourselves with the vain delusion, that a second time, after the destruction of an ancient civilisation, a new culture will arise upon the ruins of the old from a half-barbaric people. In ancient times, such a people existed fully provided with all the requisites for their mission; they were well known to the cultivated nation, and were described in its literature ”

“ By slow degrees does humanity work out its aim, the perfect ordering of life according to Reason and with Freedom; and the period of construction, in which the general Reason moulds and fashions the thoughts and practical efforts of mankind, is preceded by the destructive period of individualist criticism. The characteristics of this destructive age, the principles of the Aufklärung, are drawn by Fichte with a master-hand, and in the state of German thought and society he had before him the realisation of his sketch. ”

“ There is, then, no way of escape: if ye sink, Humanity sinks with you, without hope of future restoration.”
With much, that is over-strained and fantastic, much that is indefinite and unpractical, the ‘Addresses’ yet spoke to Germans as they had not been spoken to since the time of Luther. The idea of the unity of the German people began in them to be detached from the old ideal of the Holy Empire, and to link itself on to the history of the race, and above all to the history of the strongest German State, to the history of Prussia. ”

“ Education is a national affair, and must be conducted by the nation at the general expense. The state must support a body of teachers; and a common education, embracing along with the culture of the intellect an adequate technical training, must be provided for all. [17] By this means, and by it only, the common ethical feeling, the sense of national unity, can be fostered and made productive. Germany must become an “exclusive educational state,” and patriotic feeling become the mainspring of action. ”

“ For, as he pointedly declares in the remarkable ‘Political Fragment from the year 1813,’ “a nation becomes a nation through war and through a common struggle. Who shares not in the present war can by no decree be incorporated in the German nation.” [26] As was natural, his tendency to regard Prussia as the kernel and destined head of the united German people received fresh strength from the events of the time, for Prussia alone seemed to show the genuine enthusiasm of a nation straggling for its existence. ”

“ Now the very aim of the ‘Bestimmung des Menschen’ is to show that Spinoza’s position, that of pure naturalism, is transcended in ethical idealism; and that between the views of man as the mere product and flower of nature, and of nature as but a form in which infinite intelligence makes itself manifest in finite consciousness, the opposition is radical The same opposition, it is plain, must exist between idealism as conceived by Fichte and the Natur-philosophie to which Schelling was now advancing. ”

“ The confused and intricate mixture of sensuous and spiritual impulses shall no longer be permitted to govern the world. Mind alone, pure from all admixture of sense, shall assume the guidance of human affairs. ”

“ But when he proceeds in all matters, the greatest or the least, from the axiom that the Idea has selected but one organ—viz., Herr Fichte—himself it does appear to me that individuality becomes simple despotism. He has no measure in anything; for the smallest fault he treats the students as though they were imps of hell He pays no regard to the spirit of any law or regulation, but will have the very letter, of which his interpretation is often most ludicrous. The dementia which is mingled with his ingenium is really childlike. ”

“ Into the arrangements for the government of the university, for the payment of teachers and the support of scholars, Fichte enters at great length, but his treatment presents little or nothing of interest. One cannot avoid a feeling of surprise at the one-sided vision which could see no possible evil in the reinstatement of a cloister-life as the substitute for the freer academic air of a university. ”

“ The scholars, who are destined to fulfil a high aim in the state, who are to represent culture and intelligence, must be carefully prepared in the preliminary school-education, must be isolated from all the details of life, and must have the means of support secured to them. The university will itself form a seminary or training-school for professors. ”

“ The languages of the Germanic and the Neo-Latin races, as compared with the pure German tongue, are lifeless and mechanical. No people which had not a free and original national feeling could have taken up and worked out to a glorious termination the great idea of the Reformation. ”

“ In these lectures one finds much difficulty in recognising the brilliant expositor of the earlier ‘Wissenschaftslehre.’ Fichte labours with harsh and forced metaphors to make clear his new conception of the whole intelligible world, of which knowledge is but an imperfect fragment; but over the entire exposition there hangs an air of obscurity and mysticism foreign to his original mode of thinking, and rendering comprehension of his meaning unusually hard. ”

“ For in the latter, while in words Reason is made the supreme unity out of which all flows, in reality Nature is regarded as an independent fact, endowed with formative powers, and giving rise to human consciousness as we know it. ”

“ When this first course is completed, the studies are then separated according to the broad divisions of philology, philosophy, history, and natural science. The old division of faculties in no way corresponds to the guiding principle of university training, that it shall deal with the scientific use of the understanding. Law, e.g., is on the one side professional merely; on the other, when it has a scientific aspect, it falls under history and philosophy. Medicine, in so far as scientific, rests upon, and should be included under, natural science. ”

“ There seemed to be need of some such organ, for the Jena ‘Allgemeine Literaturzeitung,’ formerly devoted to the Fichtean ideas, was beginning to waver in its allegiance, and Nicolai, in the ‘Neue Allgemeine Bibliothek,’ and in many a dreary satire, was prosecuting, after his antiquated fashion, his favourite warfare against every novelty in literature or philosophy. Fichte, however, had deceived himself regarding his relations to his new friends. There were elements present which rapidly led to discord and even to the bitterest animosity. ”