Accept thy harsh lot, O my soul, to have seen the light only in such dark and wretched days. You can hope for naught from such a world to further your aspirations, it offers nothing for your inner development! You will necessarily find association with it a limitation, rather than an enhancement of your powers. All who know the higher ambitions experience this. Many a human heart thirsts for love; many a man is haunted by the image of an ideal companion⁹ with whom close interchange of thought and feeling would prove mutually profitable and elevating,¹⁰ but unless perchance he discovers such a friend within his own narrow circle, both he and that other consume their brief lives in a mutual longing.¹¹ The earth’s resources and their location are described by thousands; I can learn in a moment where any material thing I need is to be found, and in the next I can possess it.¹² But no means exists for discovering such a personality, as is indispensable to the nurture of my inner life.¹³ Society is not organized for such a purpose; to bring together those who need each other is no one’s business. And even if he, whose heart seeks love everywhere in vain, should learn where dwelt his friend and his beloved, yet would he be restricted by his station in life, by the rank which he holds in that meagre thing we call society. Man clings to these restricting ties more tenaciously than stone or plant to mother earth. The piteous fate of the negro, torn from his loved ones and his native land, for base servitude in a strange and distant country, is daily meted out in the routine of the world to better men also, who, prevented from reaching the distant¹⁴ homeland where dwell their unfound friends, must waste away their inner lives ineffectually in surroundings that ever remain alien and barren to them. Many a man has sufficient penetration to apprehend the inner meaning of human nature, he is prepared to discriminate its various forms and to find what is common to them,¹⁵ but it chances that he lives in a barren wilderness or amid unfruitful luxuriance, where the everlasting monotony gives no nourishment to his spirit’s needs.⁴ Thus driven inward upon itself his imagination sickens, his spirit is forced to consume itself in dreamy fictions, for the world offers him no sustenance. It is no one’s business to supply him with the sustenance he needs, or to take an interest in placing him in a more favorable atmosphere.¹⁶ Again, many a man has a genuine impulse to create works of art, but opportunity to sift his materials, to discard carefully and successfully all that is out of keeping is denied him. Or, if his project does achieve unity and fair proportions, he may lack opportunity to give its details the last touch of perfection. Does anyone furnish what he lacks, or freely offer him counsel, or take active part in perfecting his unfinished work? On the contrary, each man must stand alone and attempt the impossible! Neither in art nor in the realization of human perfection⁵ is there community of talent, such as was instituted long ago for the service of man’s external needs! The artist becomes aware of other men’s existence only when pained by criticisms irrelevant to his genius, or when their deficient understanding thwarts the effect of his own esthetic intent.¹⁷ Thus in his highest concerns man seeks help in vain from association with his fellow-beings, and even to expect such aid is exasperating and foolish in the estimations of the elect of our age. To presage a higher, more intimate, spiritual community, to wish to promote it despite limited outlooks and petty prejudices seems to them vain romanticism. If one feels oppressed by life’s limitations, they attribute it to misplaced idealism and not to life’s poverty; culpable inertia, they claim, and not a lack of social encouragement is what makes a man dissatisfied with the world and disposes him to let his empty wishes roam over vast tracts of the impossible. Impossible! yes, for him whose vision is on the low plane of the present with its small horizon. What grievous doubts would assail me of man’s ability to draw nearer his goal, if by weakness of imagination I were riveted to the actual and its immediate consequences.⁶

All who belong to a better world must for the present pine in dismal servitude! Whatever spiritual association now exists is debased in service of the earthly; aimed at some utility it confines the spirit and does violence to the inner life. When friends extend to each other the hand of fellowship, the bond should issue in something greater than each could achieve independently; each ought to grant the other full play to follow the promptings of his spirit, offering assistance only where the other feels a lack, and not insinuating his own ideas in place of his friend’s. In this wise each would find life and strength in the other, and the potentialities within him would be fully realized. But what, on the other hand, comes to pass in the world? There is always some one ready to perform material service for another, even ready to sacrifice his own well-being, while to exchange knowledge,¹⁸ to show sympathy, to mitigate sufferings, is what ranks as the highest. But there is ever an element of antipathy to the inner nature of man in ordinary friendships; people would like to have certain faults cancelled out of a friend’s character, and what would be a fault in themselves they regard as such in him, too. Thus each makes sacrifice of his individuality to suit the other, until they become alike, but neither like his own true self, unless one of them has will enough to check this ruination, or unless, after long suspense between strife and concord, the friendship weakens and dissolves.¹⁹ Woe to the man of yielding disposition, if a friend becomes attached to him! He, poor fellow, dreams of a new and stronger life, he rejoices in the happy hours which pass sweetly in this comradeship, and little does he see how his spirit becomes involved in this false felicity, and dissipates itself until at last his inner life, injured and crushed at every point, is obliterated. Many of the better sort have come to this pass, the fundamental traits of their own natures are scarcely recognizable any longer, mutilated as they are at the hand of friends and plastered all over with unnatural affectations.—Man and wife are united in tender affection, and go to build themselves a home.

Even as new individuals issue from the lap of their love, so too a new and common will should develop from the harmony of their natures. Their peaceful home with its occupations, its arrangements and private joys, should reveal this will in action. Alas! that this finest of human relationships should be so universally desecrated! Its true significance remains a closed secret to those that enter into it; each keeps and cultivates his own will after marriage as before, they take turns in governing, and in silent disappointment each reckons up whether the gain really outweighs what he has sacrificed in sheer freedom. At last each becomes the other’s fate, and confronting cold necessity, the ardor of their love dies out. In the last analysis, when measured by the same standard, all men’s accounts come equally to nought.⁷ Every home should be the beautiful embodiment,²⁰ the fine creation of a unique soul; it should have its own stamp and unique characteristics, but with a dumb monotony they are all²¹ a desolate grave of freedom and true life. Does she make him happy? Does she live for him alone? Does he make her happy? Is he all complaisance? Do both count mutual sacrifice their highest joy? O torture me not, image of misery which I see deep hid behind their bliss, a sign of nearby death, the wonted deceiver who paints before them this last counterfeit of life!—What has become of the fables of ancient sages about the state?⁸ Where is the power with which this highest level of existence should endow mankind, where the consciousness each should have of partaking in the state’s reason, its imagination, and its strength? Where is devotion to this new existence²² that man has conceived, a will to sacrifice the old individual soul rather than lose the state, a readiness to set one’s life at stake rather than see the fatherland perish? Where is foresight keeping close watch lest the country be seduced and its spirit corrupted? Where find the individual character each state should have, and the acts that reveal it? The present generation is so far from even suspecting what this side of humanity signifies, that it dreams of reorganizing the state²³ as it does of human ideals in general; each, whether he lives in one of the old or new states, would pour all into his own mold, like some sage who lays down a model for the future in his works, and hopes that one day all mankind will venerate it as the symbol of its salvation. They all believe that the best of states is one that gives least evidence of its existence, and that permits the need for which it exists to be least in evidence also.⁹ Whoever thus regards the greatest achievement of human art, by which man should be raised to the highest level of which he is capable, as nothing but a necessary evil, as an indispensable mechanism for covering up crime and mitigating its effects, must inevitably sense nothing but a limitation in that which is designed to enhance his life in the highest degree.

O what is the vile source of these great evils but the fact that man has no sense for anything but visible, external association, and that he wants to mold and measure everything in terms of this? In so far as association is external, it must always involve limitation. The man who would amass material possessions must grant others opportunity for doing likewise; the sphere occupied by each sets a limit to the rest, and they respect it only because they are not able to possess the world individually, but can make use of each other’s persons and goods. All else is concentrated upon this one end: increase in outward possessions or in knowledge, aid and protection against fate or misfortune, stronger alliances to keep rivals in check. This is all that men nowadays seek and find in friendship, marriage, and fatherland; they do not seek what they need to supplement their own efforts toward self-development, nor enrichment of the inner life. In respect to such ends every association that one enters into, from the very earliest educational ties onward, is a hindrance; at the very outset the youthful spirit, instead of enjoying free play and opportunity to see world and man as a whole, is restricted by alien ideas and early accustomed to a life of prolonged spiritual slavery.¹⁰ In the midst of wealth what lamentable poverty! How unavailing is the struggle of a superior mind, seeking moral cultivation and development, with this world that recognizes only legality, that offers dead formulas in place of life, custom and routine in place of free activity, a world that boasts of great wisdom when, happily, some outworn form is discarded and gives place to something new that seems vital at the moment, but which will all too soon become a mere formula and lifeless convention in its turn. How should I find salvation in such a world were it not for you, divine imagination! Did not you give me the certain premonition of better times to come!

Yes, culture will develop out of barbarism, and life will spring even from the sleep of death! The elements of a better life are already present. Their superior potency will not remain forever in dormant hiding; sooner or later the spirit dwelling in man will arouse them into activity. As the cultivation of the earth for man’s benefit is now far superior to that crude dominion over nature, wherein men fled timidly before every manifestation of her powers, so the blessed time when a true and spiritual society shall arise cannot be remote from this present childhood of humanity. The rude slave of nature would have believed nothing of a future dominion over her, nor would he have understood what had inspired the soul of one who prophesied thereof, for he lacked even the conception of this condition for which he felt no desire. Just so the man of today, if anyone holds up to him unfamiliar ideals or speaks of a different society and different relationships, cannot conceive of anything better or higher for which one could wish, nor is he at all fearful of anything ever coming to pass that would deeply put to shame his pride and indolent complacency. Yet if our present, much vaunted enlightenment developed out of a wretched barbarism, in which the germs of progress are scarcely discernible even now to a vision trained by the subsequent course of events, why should not our chaotic philistinism, amid which the eye already discerns through sinking mists the rudiments of a better world, give place at last to the sublime rule of moral and spiritual cultivation. It is coming! Why should I with faint heart count the hours which must still transpire or the generations that must pass away ere then? Why let the time of its coming trouble me, since time does not comprehend my inner life?

A man belongs to the world he helped to create; his will and his thought are all absorbed in it, and it is outside its bounds that he is a stranger. Whoever lives at peace with the present and desires nothing further is a contemporary of those semi-barbarous people who laid the foundations of our world; his life is a sequel to theirs, he is satisfied to enjoy the fulfillment of their wishes, and a better condition which they could not conceive, he does not conceive either. I, for my part, am a stranger to the life and thought of this present generation, I am a prophet-citizen of a later world, drawn thither by a vital imagination and strong faith; to it belong my every word and deed. What the present world is doing and undergoing leaves me unmoved; far below me it appears insignificant, and I can at a glance survey the confused course of its great revolutions.¹¹ Through every revolution whether in the field of science or of action it returns ever to the same point, and presenting ever the same features clearly reveals its limitations and the narrow scope of its endeavors. Its own works are impotent to advance it; they but keep it going in the same old cycle, and hence I can take no delight in them; I am not deceived into placing false hope in everything that appears to contain some promise. But wherever I do see a spark of the hidden fire that must sooner or later consume the outworn and recreate the world, I am drawn toward it with love and true hope as to a welcome sign of my distant home. And close at hand the sacred flame has appeared shedding its unearthly light,²⁴ a sign, to the knowing, that the spirit is there. All who like myself belong to the future are drawing toward each other in love and hope,²⁵ and each in his every word and act cements and extends a spiritual bond by which we are pledged to better times.

But this too the world makes as difficult as possible; it prevents kindred minds from recognizing each other, and contrives thus to destroy the seed of future improvement. An act, born of the most immaculate conception, is nevertheless subject to a thousand misinterpretations; it is inevitable that what has been done in the purest moral spirit should often be associated with worldly motives.²⁶ Too many mask themselves in false appearances to allow of confidence in everyone who shows signs of superior spirit. It is right to be sceptical of first appearances when looking for brothers in spirit; yet because the world and the times make ready confidence impossible, it often happens that two congenial spirits pass each other by unrecognized. Knowing this, take courage and have hope! You are not the only one whose roots strike into that deeper soil which at some distant time will be the surface; the seed of the future is germinating everywhere! Continue to look for it wherever possible. You will still find many a friend and will learn to recognize as such many whom you have long misjudged. And you yourself will be recognized by many; despite the world, mistrust and suspicion will at last disappear, if by the constancy of your action you give a steady token to the pure in heart. You need but impress the spirit’s stamp incisively upon every action, that those who are near may discover you. Only pronounce clearly the sentiment of your heart, that those who are distant may hear!

To be sure, the world, again, has the magic of language at its command, and we have not.²⁷ Language has exact symbols in fine abundance for everything thought and felt in the world’s sense; it is the clearest mirror of the times, a work of art revealing the current spirit. But for our purposes language is still crude and undeveloped, a poor instrument of communion.¹² O how long at the outset it hinders the spirit from arriving at an immediate vision of itself! Before it has yet found itself the spirit is enmeshed in the world through language, and its first difficulty is to gradually extricate itself from this entanglement. And if in spite of all the errors and corruptions introduced by words, the spirit has at last penetrated through to truth, how treacherously language then changes her tactics, now isolating and imprisoning its victim, so that he cannot communicate his discovery, nor receive further sustenance from the outside. Long must he search amid the profusion of language before a term can be found, above all suspicion, to which his inmost thought can be entrusted; once found the unspiritual immediately catch up the phrase, give it some strange twist, so that a person hearing it thereafter must needs doubt as to its original connections. Many a word comes in answer from a distance to such an isolated soul, but he must question whether it really means what it means to him, whether it was sent by friend or foe. Is then language indeed the common possession of the children of the spirit and the children of the world! How absurd that the latter should pretend to an interest in true wisdom! No, they shall not succeed either in confusing or intimidating us! We are here waging a great battle around the sacred standard of humanity, which we, men of the future, must maintain for the coming generations. It is a decisive battle, but also a certain victory, to be won, independent of chance or fortune, by spiritual strength and genuine art.

Manners should be the outer garment worn by inner individuality,¹³ delicately and significantly adapted to its form, revealing its fine proportions and gracefully following its movement. Always treat this consummate investiture with piety, giving it ever a lighter and finer texture, drawing it ever more closely about the self. Then must hypocrisy at length come to end, for a profane and vulgar nature appearing in the guise of nobility will soon be exposed. The informed observer will at every movement detect concealed defects,²⁸ the magic raiment will fall loosely where there is emptiness, and betray inward unshapeliness by its flutter at every rapid step. Thus the constancy and evenness of one’s bearing ought to become and will become an infallible criterion of the spiritual nature within, and a token by which superior minds privately recognize each other. Language too should objectify the most interior thoughts, the highest intuitions, the most hidden observations of the spirit upon its own conduct, and the marvelous music of words should indicate the value, the degree of love, attached to each object. For though others can abuse the symbols which we consecrate to the highest, and can insinuate their petty and limited meanings where the reference is to the holy, yet is the tone of the worldling different from that of the consecrated. The same intellectual symbols dispose themselves differently and suggest a different melody to the wise than to the slaves of the age; the latter elevate something else to a first principle, and arrive at consequences that to the former are remote and strange. Each of us need only make his language thoroughly his own and artistically all of a piece, so that its derivation and modulation, its logic and its sequences, exactly represent the structure of his spirit, and the music of his speech has the accent of his heart and the keynote of his thought. If we do this, there will appear within the vulgar tongue another language, secret and holy, which the unconsecrated can neither interpret nor imitate, because the key to its characters lies in its spiritual meaning; a few phrases of his thought, a few notes of his discourse will betray the outsider.¹⁴

O if only the wise and the good might thus recognize each other by their manner and their language, if the present confusion were only dissolved and the issue clearly drawn, if the inner feud would only come to an open breach! Then victory too would draw nigh, a fairer sun would rise, for the younger generation with its open mind and unprejudiced spirit would surely incline to the better side. Significant actions can but announce the spirit’s presence, and miracles must bear witness to an imprint of divine origin.¹⁵ It would then be evident that the absence of beauty and unity in one’s bearing, or the assuming of manners as a frigid semblance to disguise deformity, betokens deficient awareness of inner reality. It would be evident that he knows nothing about self-cultivation and has never beheld in himself the essential man, for whom the foundation-stones of language, quarried out of the inner life, have weathered and broken into small fragments; whose eloquence, designed to touch the depths, evaporates into meaningless phrases and superficial polish, while its lofty music degenerates into idle tonal artifices that are impotent to represent the real character of the spirit. No one can live simply and in the way of beauty save he who hates lifeless formulas, seeks after genuine self-cultivation, and so belongs to a world that is yet to be. No one can become a true artist in the use of language save he who sees himself with unclouded insight and has made the inner nature of man his own.

It is the quiet omnipotence of these sentiments, and not the criminal violence of vain experimentation, that must at last produce reverence for the highest and the dawn of a better age. May it be the aim of my life to promote such reverence, and may I thereby discharge my obligations to the world and fulfill my calling. Thus will the power I exercize combine with the efforts of all the elect, and what issues from my nature as a free activity will help mankind on the way to its true goal.

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← Soundings · Contents · Prospect →

Footnotes

1. The phrase “colors of darkness” no doubt characterizes the doctrine of human depravity which the Enlightenment attacked. ↩

2. “Its body” here means the whole material world. Cf. above pp. 16-17. ↩

3. The thought here seems somewhat forced. The field to which a person’s activity is restricted varies with the extent of his powers. Life demands much from him to whom it gives much, and the ratio between give and take is the same for all. ↩

4. Cf. Schopenhauer’s essay on The Wisdom of Life, II. ↩

5. See note on p. 19 with reference to this recurring dichotomy. ↩

6. See the development of this idea below on pp. 81-84. ↩

7. Cf. above pp. 51-52 and note. ↩

8. The reference is probably to Plato’s Republic. ↩

9. Among other laisser-faire theorists Schleiermacher may have had Wm. von Humboldt in mind in this passage, who had stated his belief in the limitation of the state’s functions in 1792. (See Schiele, p. 106.) ↩

10. The problem of freedom and individuality was a major consideration in Schleiermacher’s educational theory. Cf. pp. 78-79, of the text, and also his lectures on pedagogy (Werke, III, v. 9). His notes contain a “Catechism of reason for women of quality,” the fifth commandment of which reads: “Honor the individuality and wilfullness of your children, that it may go well with them and their lives upon earth may be strong.” (See Schiele, p. 106, and Dilthey, Appendix, pp. 83-84.) ↩

11. No doubt Schleiermacher has in mind particularly the French Revolution and the Kantian revolution in philosophy. See Introduction, pp. xxi-xxxiii. Cf. also pp. 74-75, of the text. ↩

12. The ensuing passage on language brings out some literary conceptions of the romantic movement. Cf. especially the passage on the music of language, p. 66. See Dilthey, pp. 260-296; N. E. 296-331. ↩

13. The German word “Sitte,” which I have here translated by “manners” has, of course, the wider meaning of one’s entire “bearing,” “behavior,” “deportment,” etc., and hence I have at times used these terms in the sequel where the same German word recurs. ↩

14. Cf. Introduction, pp. xvii, xxxviii, for comment on this tendency toward the esoteric in romanticism. Cf. also pp. 11-12. ↩

15. As to “miracles” cf. On Religion, pp. 88-89. ↩