s and arrives at that intellectual superiority in which
the contemplation and understanding of things give sufficient
contentment, without making it needful for man to stretch out his hands
to take possession of them; a thought which Goethe's friend, Schiller,
has magnificently developed in his grand philosophical poems. Optimism
and pessimism disappear at once, as well as fatalism; the highest and
most refined intellect again accepts the world, as children and ignorant
toilers do: as a given necessity. He does not even think the world could
be otherwise, and within its limits he not only enjoys and suffers, but
also works gayly, trying like Horace, to subject things to himself, but
resigned to submit to them when they are invincible. Thus the simple
Hellenic existence which, contrary to Christianity, but according to
nature, accepted the present without ceaselessly thinking of death and
another world, and acted in that present and in the circumstances
allotted to each by fate, without wanting to overstep the boundaries of
nature, would revive again in our modern world and free us forever from
the torment of unaccomplished wishes and of vain terrors.

The sojourn in Italy, during which Goethe lived outside the struggle for
life, outside the competition and contact of practical activity, in the
contemplation of nature and art, developed this view--the spectator's
view--which will always be that of the artist and of the thinker,
strongly opposed to that of the actor on the stage of human life.
_Iphigenie_, _Torquato Tasso_, _Wilhelm Meister_, are the fruits and the
interpreters of this conception of the moral world. What ripened and
perfected it so as to raise it into a general view, not only of
morality, but also of the great philosophical questions which man is
called upon to answer, was his study of nature, greatly furthered during
his stay in Italy. The problem which lay at the bottom of all the vague
longing of his generation for nature _he_ was to solve. It became his
incessant endeavor to understand the coherence and unity of nature.

"You are forever searching for what is necessary in nature," Schiller
wrote to him once, "but you search for it by the most difficult way. You
take the whole of nature in order to obtain light on the particular
case; you look into the totality for the explanation of the individual
existence. From the simplest organism (in nature) you ascend step by
step to the more complicated, and fi