When we were to be dreamed, an angel grew drowsy and fell asleep and
dreamed. Then came _Phantasus_,[288] and swept broken meteorological,
phenomena, things like nights, fragments of chaos, conglomerated
plants, before him, and disappeared with them.
Then came _Phobetor_, who drove herds of beasts along before him, that
murdered and grazed as they passed, and disappeared with them.
Then came _Morpheus_ and played before him with happy children, with
crowned mothers, with shapes that kissed each other, and with fleeting
mortals, and when the angel awoke with ecstasy, Morpheus and the human
race and the world's history had disappeared....
--At present the angel still sleeps and dreams,--we are still in his
dream,--only _Phobetor_ is with him, and Morpheus still waits for
Phobetor with his beasts to disappear....
But let us, instead of dreaming, think and hope; and for the present
ask: will _vegetable_ men, _animal_ men, at last be succeeded by
_divine_ men? Does the _going_ of the world-clock betray as much design
as the building of it, and has it a _dial-plate_ wheel and an _index
hand_?
One cannot (with a well-known philosopher) reason directly from final
causes in _Physics_ to final causes in _History_, any more than I, in
the individual, can deduce from the teleological (intentional)
structure of a man a teleological biography of the same, or any more
than, from the ingenious structure of animals, I call infer a
continuous plan in their universal history. Nature is iron, always the
same, and the wisdom shown in her framework is never obscured; the
human race is free, and, like the infusorial animal, the multiform
Vorticelle, assumes every moment, now regular, now anomalous shapes.
Every physical disorder is only the hull of an order, every foul spring
is the hull of a fair autumn; but are, then, our vices the buds of our
virtues, and is the earthly fall of a continually sinking villain
nothing but a disguised ascension of his to heaven?--And is there an
object in the life of a Nero? Then I could just as well take back and
reverse all and make out virtues to be the heart-leaves of disguised
vices. But if, as many a one does, we carry the abuse of language so
far as to reverse _moral_ height and depth, like _geometrical_,
according to the _point of view_, as _positive_ and _negative_
magnitudes; if, therefore, all gouty knobs, spotted fevers, and
_lead_-[289] or _silver_-colics of the human race are nothing but a
different kind of healthiness: then we certainly need not ask whether
man will ever get well; in that case he could never in any possible
maladies be anything but well.
If a monk of the tenth century had shut himself up in a fit of
melancholy, and meditated on the earth, not however on its end, but on
its future: would not, in his dreams, the thirteenth century have been
already a brighter one, and the eighteenth merely a glorified tenth?
Our weather-prophesyings from _present_ temperature are logically
correct and historically false, because new casualties, an earthquake,
a comet, reverse the currents of the whole atmosphere. Can the
above-imagined monk correctly calculate, if he does not assume such
future magnitudes as America, Gunpowder, and Printer's ink?--A new
religion, a new Alexander, a new disease, a new Franklin, can break,
swallow up, dam, turn back the forest stream whose course and contents
we propose to reduce on our parchment. There lie still four quarters of
the globe full of enchained savage races;--their chain daily grows
thinner,--time unlooses it;--what desolation, at least what changes,
must they not bring about on the little _bowling-green_ of our
cultivated countries? Nevertheless, all nations of the earth must one
day be fused together and be purified in a common fermentation, if ever
this atmosphere of life is to be cleared up.
Can we draw from some miniature earthquakes and volcanoes, which we
ourselves have produced with iron-filings and aquafortis, (in this
case, types and printer's ink,) conclusions as to the Ætna eruptions,
i. e. from the revolutions of the few cultivated peoples as to those of
the uncultivated? Since we may assume that the human race lives as many
thousands of years as the individual does years, may we venture from
the sixth year to set the horoscope of youth and manhood? Add to this
that the biography of this childish period is precisely the most
meagre, and that awakened nations--almost all quarters of the globe are
as yet full of sleeping ones--in _one_ year produce more historical
material, and _consequently_ more historians, than a sleep-buried
Africa in a century. We shall, therefore, _then_ be best able to
prophesy from universal history, when the awaking nations shall have
appended to it their million or two supplementary volumes.--All savage
nations seem to have been under _one_ stamp; on the contrary, the mint
of culture coins each one differently. The North American and the old
German resemble each other more strongly than Germans do Germans of
neighboring centuries. Neither the Golden Bull, nor the _Magna Charta_,
nor the _Code Noir_, could Aristotle inlay into his forms of government
and obedience; else he would have extended them; but are we then
confident of foreseeing any better the future national convention in
Mongolia, or the Decretal Letters and Extravagants of the enlightened
Dalai-Lama, or the Recesses of the Arab Imperial Bench of Knights?
Since Nature coins no people with _one_ mint-stamp or one hand alone,
but with thousands at once,--hence on the German race is there a
greater multitude of impressions than on the shield of Achilles,--how
do we, who cannot even calculate the past, but simpler, revolutions of
the globe, expect to look into the moral ones of its inhabitants?
Of all that follows from these premises I believe the opposite,
excepting the necessity of prophetic modesty. Scepticism, which makes
us, instead of slow to believe, unbelieving, and instead of the _eyes_
proposes to purge the _light_, becomes nonsense and the most fearful
philosophical impotence and atony.
Man regards his century or his half-century as the culmination of
light, as a festal-day, to which all other centuries lead only as
week-days. He knows only two golden ages,--the one at the beginning of
the world, and the one at the end of it,--by which he understands only
his own; he finds history to be like great woods, in the middle of
which are silence, night-birds, and birds of prey, and whose borders
only are filled with light and song.--Certainly all things serve me;
but I too serve all. As Nature, who in her eternity knows no loss of
time, in her inexhaustibleness no loss of power, has no other law of
frugality assigned her than that of prodigality,--as she, with _eggs_
and _seed-corns_, ministers equally well to _nourishment_ and to
_propagation_,[290] and with an undeveloped germ-world sustains half a
developed one,--as her way leads over no smooth bowling-alley, but over
alps and seas;--our little heart must needs misunderstand her, whether
in its hopes or in its fears; it must, as it becomes enlightened,
reciprocally interchange _morning_ and _evening red_; it must, in
its contentment, now regard after-summer as _spring_, and now
_after-winter_ as _autumn_. _Moral_ revolutions mislead us more than
_physical_, because the former according to their nature occupy a
_greater_ play-room and space of time than the latter,--and yet the
Dark Ages are nothing but a dipping into the shadow of _Saturn_, or an
eclipse of the sun of short duration. A man who should be six thousand
years old, would say to the six creation-days of the world's history,
They are very good.
But one should never set _moral_ and _physical_ revolutions and
developments too near to each other. All Nature has no other motions
than _former_ ones; the circle is her path, she has no other years than
Platonic,--but man alone is _changeable_, and the straight line or the
zigzag describes his course. A sun has its eclipses as well as the
moon, has its bloom and decay like a flower, but also its
_palingenesia_ and renovation. But there lies in the human race the
necessity of an everlasting mutation; yet here there are only
_ascending_ and _descending_ signs, no culmination; they do not
necessarily draw one another after them, as in physics, and have no
extreme limit. No people, no period returns; in physics, all must come
back again. It is only accidental, not necessary, that nations, at a
certain age and stage of progress, and on a certain rotten round of the
ladder, fall again,--one only confounds the _last_ step, from which
nations fall, with the _highest_; the Romans, with whom not single
rounds, but the whole ladder broke, were not necessitated to sink by a
culture which does not equal even our own.[291] Nations have no age, or
old age with them often precedes youth. Even with individuals the
crab's-walk of the mind in old age is only accidental; still less has
virtue in them a summer-solstice. Humanity has then the capacity of an
endless improvement; but has it the hope also?--
The disturbance of the _equipoise_ of his own faculties makes the
individual man miserable; the _inequality_ of citizens, the
_inequality_ of nations, makes the earth miserable; just as lightnings
arise from the neighborhood of the ebb and flow of the ether, and all
storms from unequal distributions of air. But fortunately it lies in
the nature of mountains to fill the valleys.
Not inequality of goods,--for the majority of voices and fists on the
part of the poor balances in the scale the power of the rich,--but
inequality of culture, does most to create and distribute the political
fly-presses and forcing-pumps. The _Lex agraria_ in the fields of
science passes over at last into the physical fields. Since the tree of
knowledge has thrust out its branches from the school windows of
philosophy and the church windows of the priesthood into the common
garden, all nations have become stronger.--Unequal cultivation chains
the West Indies to the feet of Europe, Helots to Spartans, and the iron
hollow-head[292] with the trigger on the negro's tongue presupposes a
hollow-head of another kind.
With such a frightful disparity among nations in power, wealth,
culture, only a universal rush of storms from all points of the compass
can terminate in a lasting calm. A perpetual balance of Europe
presuppose a balance of the four remaining parts of the world, which
one may, deducting small librations, promise our globe. In future men
will quite as little discover a salvage as an island. One people must
draw another out of pits blundering years. A more equal culture will
conclude commercial treaties with more equal advantages. The longest
rainy months of humanity--which always fell upon the time of national
transplantations, just as one always sets out flowers on cloudy
days--have spent themselves.
One spectre still remains from the midnight, which reaches far into the
hours of light,--War. But the claws and bill of the armorial eagle grow
on, till, like the boar's tusks, they crook up and make themselves
useless. As it was calculated in regard to Vesuvius, that it contained
material for only forty-three eruptions more,--so might one also reckon
the number of future wars. This long tempest, which already for six
thousand years has been standing over our planet, will continue to
storm till clouds and earth have charged each other full with an
_equal_ measure of electric matter.
_All_ nations become illuminated only in joint fermentation; and the
precipitate is blood and dead men's bones. Were the earth narrowed
to one half of its size, then would the time of its moral--and
physical--development be shortened one half.
With wars the strongest drag-chains of the sciences are cut off. Once
war-machines were the sowing-machines of new knowledges, while they
crushed old harvests; now it is the press which scatters the pollen
more widely and gently. Instead of an Alexander, Greece would need now
to send to Asia nothing but a--compositor; the conqueror grafts, the
author sows.
It is a characteristic of enlightenment that, although it still leaves
to individuals the possibility of the illusion and weakening of vice,
nevertheless it releases nations from company-vices and national
deceptions,--e. g. from wrecking, piracy. The best and worst deeds we
do in company; war is an example. The slave-trade must in our days,
unless indeed the trade in subjects begins, come to an end.[293]
The highest and steepest thrones stand, like the highest mountains, in
the warmest lands. The political mountains, like the physical, daily
grow lower (especially when they spout fire), and must at last be with
the valleys in a common plain.