and which in some
respects will always be the ideal of the best men in Germany, even when
circumstances have wrought a change in the intellectual and social
conditions of their country, so as to necessitate a total transformation
and accommodation of those views.

We cannot regard it merely as the natural effect of advancing years if
Goethe and Schiller modified and cleared their views; if Kant, whose
great emancipating act, the _Critique of Pure Reason_, falls
chronologically in the same period (1781), corrected what seemed to him
too absolute in his system, and reconstructed from the basis of the
conscience that metaphysical world which he had destroyed by his
analysis of the intellect. The world just then was undergoing profound
changes. The great "Philosopher-king" had descended to the tomb (1786),
and with him the absolute liberty of thought which had reigned for
forty-six years. The French Revolution, after having exalted all
generous souls, and seemingly confirmed the triumph of liberty and
justice which the generation had witnessed in America, took a direction
and drifted into excesses which undeceived, sobered, and saddened even
the most hopeful believers. As regards personal circumstances, the
Italian journey of Goethe (1786-1788) and his scientific investigations
into nature, the study of Kant's new philosophy to which Schiller
submitted his undisciplined mind (1790 and 1791), were the high-schools
out of which their genius came strengthened and purified, although their
aesthetic and moral doctrines did not remain quite unimpaired by them. I
shall endeavor to give an idea of this double process and its results at
the risk of being still more abstract and dry than before.

Man is the last and highest link in nature; his task is to understand
what she aims at in him and then to fulfil her intentions. This view of
Herder's was Goethe's starting-point in the formation of his
_Weltanschauung_ (or general view of things).

"All the world," says one of the characters in _Wilhelm Meister_,
"lies before us, like a vast quarry before the architect. He does not
deserve the name if he does not compose with these accidental natural
materials an image whose source is in his mind, and if he does not do it
with the greatest possible economy, solidity, and perfection. All that
we find outside of us, nay, within us, is object-matter; but deep within
us lives also a power capable of giving an ideal form to this matter.
This