but that its institutions are an "inheritance" bequeathed to us from the "collected wisdom" of our forefathers. The continuity of political life centers not about an inner evolving Idea, but about "our hearths, our sepulchers and our altars." He has the same suspicion of abstract rights of man. But his appeal is to experience and to practical consequences. Since "circumstances give in reality to every principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect," there is no soundness in any principle when "it stands stripped of every relation in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction."
According to the German view, the English protested because of interference with empirically established rights and privileges; the Germans, because they perceived in the Revolution a radical error as to the nature and work of reason. In point of fact, the Germans never made that break with tradition, political or religious, of which the French Revolution is an emphatic symbol. I have already referred to Kant's disposition to regard church dogmas (of which, as dogmas, he disapproved) as vehicles of eternal spiritual truths—husks to preserve an inner grain. All of the great German idealists gave further expression to this disposition. To Hegel, for example, the substance of the doctrines of Protestant Christianity is identical with the truths of absolute philosophy, except that in religion they are expressed in a form not adequate to their meaning, the form, namely, of imaginative thought in which most men live. The disposition to philosophize Christianity is too widely shown in Germany to be dismissed as a cowardly desire at accommodation with things established. It shows rather an intellectual piety among a people where freedom of thought and conscience had been achieved without a violent political upheaval. Hegel finds that the characteristic weakness of Romance thought was an inner split, an inability to reconcile the spiritual and absolute essence of reality with which religion deals with the detailed work of intelligence in science and politics. The Germans, on the contrary, "were predestined to be the bearers of the Christian principle and to carry out the Idea as the absolutely Rational end." They accomplished this, not by a flight away from the secular world, but by realizing that the Christian principle is in itself that of the unity of the subjective and the objective, the spiritual and the worldly. The "spirit finds the goal of its struggle, its harmony, in that very sphere which it made the object of its resistance,—it finds that secular pursuits are a spiritual occupation";—a discovery, surely, which unites simplicity with comprehensiveness and one which does not lead to criticism of the secular pursuits carried on. Whatever is to be said of this as philosophy, it expresses, in a way, the quality of German life and thought. More than other countries, Germany has had the fortune to preserve as food for its imaginative life and as emotional sanction the great ideas of the past. It has carried over their reinforcement into the pursuit of science and into politics—into the very things which in other countries, notably in the Latin countries, have been used as weapons of attack upon tradition.
Political development tells a somewhat similar tale. The painful transition from feudalism to the modern era was, for the most part, accomplished recently in Germany, and accomplished under the guidance of established political authorities instead of by revolt against them. Under their supervision, and mainly at their initiative, Germany has passed in less than a century to the régime of modern capitalistic competitive enterprise, moderated by the State, out of the dominion of those local and guild restrictions which so long held economic activity in corporate bonds. The governing powers themselves secured to members of the State what seems, at least to Germans, to be a satisfying degree of political freedom. Along with this absence of internal disturbance and revolution, we must put the fact that every step in the development of Germany as a unified political power has been effected by war with some of the neighbors by which it is hemmed in. There stands the unfolding sequence: 1815 (not to go back to Frederick the Great), 1864, 1866, 1870. And the significant thing about these wars is not that external territory was annexed as their consequence, but the rebound of external struggle upon the achieving of internal unity. No wonder the German imagination has been impressed with the idea of an organic evolution from within, which takes the form of a unity achieved through conflict and the conquest of an opposing principle.
Such scattering comments as these prove nothing. But they suggest why German thought has been peculiarly sensitive to the idea of historic continuity; why it has been prone to seek for an original implicit essence which has progressively unfolded itself in a single development. It would take much more than an hour to give even a superficial account of the growth of the historical sciences and historic methods of Germany during the first half of the eighteenth century. It would involve an account of the creation of philology, and the philological methods which go by the name of higher criticism; of their extension to archeology; of the historic schools of jurisprudence and political economy, as well as of the ways in which such men as Niebuhr, Mommsen and Ranke remade the methods of studying the past. I can only say here that Germany developed such an effective historical technique that even mediocre men achieved respectable results; and, much more significantly, that when Taine made the remark (quoted earlier) that we owe to the Germany of the half century before 1830 all our distinctively modern ideas, his remarks apply above all to the disciplines concerned with the historical development of mankind.
The bases of this philosophy are already before us. Even in Kant we find the idea of a single continuous development of humanity, as a progress from a reign of natural instinct to a final freedom won through adherence to the law of reason. Fichte sketched the stages already traversed on this road and located the point at which mankind now stands. In his later writings, the significance of history as the realization of the absolute purpose is increasingly emphasized. History is the continuous life of a divine Ego by which it realizes in fact what it is in idea or destiny. Its phases are successive stages in the founding of the Kingdom of God on earth. It and it only is the revelation of the Absolute. Along with this growing deification of history is the increased significance attached to nationalism in general and the German nation in particular. The State is the concrete individual interposed between generic humanity and particular beings. In his words, the national folk is the channel of divine life as it pours into particular finite human beings. He says:
"While cosmopolitanism is the dominant will that the purpose of the existence of humanity be actually realized in humanity, patriotism is the will that this end be first realized in the particular nation to which we ourselves belong, and that this achievement thence spread over the entire race."
Since the State is an organ of divinity, patriotism is religion. As the Germans are the only truly religious people, they alone are truly capable of patriotism. Other peoples are products of external causes; they have no self-formed Self, but only an acquired self due to general convention. In Germany there is a self which is self-wrought and self-owned. The very fact that Germany for centuries has had no external unity proves that its selfhood is metaphysical, not a gift of circumstance. This conception of the German mission has been combined with a kind of anthropological metaphysics which has become the rage in Germany. The Germans alone of all existing European nations are a pure race. They alone have preserved unalloyed the original divine deposit. Language is the expression of the national soul, and only the Germans have kept their native speech in its purity. In like vein, Hegel attributes the inner disharmony characteristic of Romance peoples to the fact that they are of mixed Germanic and Latin blood. A purely artificial cult of race has so flourished in Germany that many social movements—like anti-Semitism—and some of Germany's political ambitions cannot be understood apart from the mystic identification of Race, Culture and the State. In the light of actual science, this is so mythological that the remark of an American periodical that race means a number of people reading the same newspapers is sober scientific fact compared with it.5
At the beginning of history Fichte placed an "Urvolk." His account of it seems an attempt to rationalize at one stroke the legends of the Golden Age, the Biblical account of man before the Fall and Rousseau's primitive "state of nature." The Urvolk lived in a paradise of innocence, a paradise without knowledge, labor or art. The philosophy which demands such a Folk is comparatively simple. Except as a manifestation of Absolute Reason, humanity could not exist at all. Yet in the first stage of the manifestation, Reason could not have been appropriated by the self-conscious effort of man. It existed without consciousness of itself, for it was given, not, like all true self-consciousness, won by morally creative struggle. Rational in substance,