d by a mere theory; and Goethe is not
slow to declare how he views attempts to reach it in that way. "_Credo
Deum!_ that," he reminds us here, "is a fine, a worthy thing to say; but
to recognise God when and where he reveals himself, is the only true
bliss on earth." All else is mystery. We are not born, as he said to
Eckermann, to solve the problems of the world, but to find out where the
problem begins, and then to keep within the limits of what we can grasp.
The problem, he urged, is transformed into a postulate: if we cannot get
a solution theoretically, we can get it in the experience of practical
life. We reach it by the use of an "active scepticism," of which he says
that "it continually aims at overcoming itself and arriving by means of
regulated experience at a kind of conditioned certainty." But he would
have nothing to do with doctrinal systems, and, like Schiller, professed
none of the forms of religion from a feeling of religion itself. To see
how he views some particular questions of theology the reader may turn
with profit to his maxims on the Reformation and early Christianity, and
to his admirable remarks on the use and abuse of the Bible. The basis of
religion was for him its own earnestness; and it was not always needful,
he held, for truth to take a definite shape: "it is enough if it hovers
about us like a spirit and produces harmony." "I believe," he said to
Eckermann, "in God and Nature and the victory of good over evil; but I
was also asked to believe that three was one, and one was three. That
jarred upon my feeling for truth; and I did not see how it could have
helped me in the least." As for letting our minds roam beyond this
present life, he thought there was actual danger in it; although he
looked for a future existence, a continuation of work and activity, in
which what is here incomplete should reach its full development. And
whatever be the secrets of the universe, assuredly the best we can do is
to do our best here; and the worst of blasphemies is to regard this life
as altogether vanity; for as these pages tell us, "it would not be worth
while to see seventy years if all the wisdom of this world were
foolishness with God."

In Goethe we pass, as over a bridge, from the eighteenth century to the
nineteenth; but though he lived to see a third of the nineteenth
century, he hardly belongs to it. Of its political characteristics he
had few or none. He was no democrat. As the prophet of inward