God = _Deutschtum_. In practice it is enough that an idea is
authentically German in order that we may and must conclude that it is
true, that it is just, and that it ought to prevail.

What are the essential dogmas of this truth, which is German because it
is true and which is true because it is German? German metaphysicians
explain that to us more clearly than is usual by thought. The first
quality of this truth is that it is in opposition to what classic or
Greco-Latin thought would recognize as true. The latter has sought to
discover what in man is essentially human, to render man superior to
other beings, and to substitute more and more the superior elements for
the inferior elements in human life--reason for blind impulse, justice
for force, good for wickedness. It has undertaken to create in the world
a moral force capable of controlling and humanizing material forces. To
this doctrine, which rests upon man as its centre and which was
essentially human, German thought opposes itself as the infinite opposes
the finite, the absolute the relative, the whole the part. The disciples
of the Greeks had at their disposition no light except that of human
reason; the German genius possesses a transcendent reason which pierces
the mysteries of the absolute, of the Divine. What would light be
without the shadow from which it is detached? How could the ego exist if
there was not somewhere a non ego to which it is opposed? Evil is not
less indispensable than good in the transcendent symphony of the whole.

There is something more. It may be a satisfaction for a Greco-Latin,
impelled by his mediocre logic to say that good is good, evil is evil,
but these simple formulas are contrary to the truth per se. Good by
itself is absolutely impotent to realize itself. It is only an idea, an
abstraction. The power and faculty of creation belong to evil alone. So
that if good is to be realized it can only be by means of evil, and by
means of evil left entirely to itself. God could not exist if He were
not created by the devil, and thus, in a sense, evil is good and good is
bad. Evil is good because it creates. Good is bad because it is
impotent. The supreme and true divine law is just this: That evil left
to itself, evil as evil, gives birth to good, which, by itself, would
never be able to advance from the ideal to the real. "I am," said
Mephistopheles, "part of that force which always wishes evil and always
creates the good." Such is t