eral"--but the highest
result of the poet's insight into the order of nature.

I have said that there was an antagonism between Kant's views and those
of Herder and Goethe, and that this antagonism has been ever since
sensibly felt in the intellectual history of Germany. Some efforts were
made to reconcile them, as for instance by Schiller. Sometimes a sort of
alliance took place, as in 1813, when the Romanticists, who were quite
under the spell of the Herder-Goethe ideas, invoked the aid of the moral
energy, which was a special characteristic of Kant's disciples; but the
antagonism lives on not the less even now in the German nation, as the
antagonism between Hume and Burke, Locke and Berkeley, Fielding and
Richardson, Shakespeare and Milton, nay, between Renaissance and
Puritanism in spite of their apparent death, is still living in the
English nation. This difference is, as will happen in this world, much
more the difference between two dispositions of mind, character, and
temperament, than between two opposite theories; or at least the
conflicting opinions are much more the result of our moral and
intellectual dispositions than of objective observation and abstract
argumentation. Germany owes much to the stern unflinching moral
principles of Kant; she owes still more, however, to the serene and
large views of Goethe. The misfortune of both ideals is that they
cannot and will never be accessible save to a small _elite_, that of
Kant to a moral, that of Goethe to an intellectual, elite. But are not
all ideals of an essentially aristocratic nature? The German ideals,
however, are so more than others, and the consequence has been a wide
gap between the mass of the nation and the minority which has been true
to those ideals. The numerical majority, indeed, of the German nation
has either remained faithful to the Church, though without fanaticism,
or has become materialistic and rationalistic. It is a great misfortune
for a nation when its greatest writer in his greatest works is only
understood by the happy few, and when its greatest moralist preaches a
moral which is above the common force of human nature. The only means of
union between the nation and the intellectual and moral aristocracy,
which has kept and guarded that treasure, as well as the only link
between these two aristocratic views of life themselves, would be
furnished by religion, a religion such as Lessing, Mendelssohn, and
above all Schleiermacher, propo