as for example most of the passions,
opposed to reason and conscience, therefore to the very faculties of man
which, being quite general and disinterested, may most safely be
designated as those which connect him immediately with the universe, and
has this contradiction ever been explained away? Why, then, in art
negate an act upon which is founded even our view of nature?

Otto Prechtler related to me the following incident. When Grillparzer
made my acquaintance upon my arrival in Vienna he said to Prechtler: "No
one on earth will be able to influence this man. One person might have
done so, but he is dead; I mean Goethe." A few years later he added, "I
was mistaken, not even Goethe would have been able to influence him."

(1863)

I do not know the world, for although I myself represent a piece of it,
this is such a minutely small part that no conclusion as to the true
nature of the world can be deduced therefrom. Man, however, I know, for
I am myself a man, and even though I do not know how he originates in
the world, yet I know very well how, having once originated, he reacts
upon it. I therefore conscientiously respect the laws of the human soul;
in reference to everything else, however, I believe that imagination
draws inspiration from the same depths out of which the world itself
arose, that is to say, the multifarious series of phenomena which exists
at present, but which at some future time, may perhaps be replaced by
another.

(To Siegmund Englaender.)

--You wish to believe in the poet as you believe in the Deity; why
ascend so high into the region of clouds, where everything ceases to be,
even analogy? Would you not probably attain more if you descended to the
beast and ascribed to the artistic faculty an intermediate stage between
the instinct of the beast and the consciousness of man? There at least
we are in the sphere of experience, and have the prospect of
ascertaining something real by applying two known quantities to an
unknown one. The beast leads a dream life which nature herself
immediately regulates and strictly adapts to those purposes, by the
attainment of which, on the one hand, the creature itself subsists, but,
on the other, the world continues. The artist leads a similar dream
life, naturally only as an artist, and probably from the same cause; for
the cosmic laws hardly come any more clearly into his field of vision
than the organic laws come into that of the beast, and yet he cannot