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THE EGO AND HIS OWN

make their way further than to theology. We shall
see later that even the newest revolts against God are
nothing but the extremest efforts of " theology," i. e.
theological insurrections.

§ 1.--THE SPIRIT

The realm of spirits is monstrously great, there is

an infinite deal of the spiritual; yet let us look and see
what the spirit, this bequest of the ancients, properly
is.

Out of their birth-pangs it came forth, but they

themselves could not utter themselves as spirit; they
could give birth to it, it itself must speak. The
" born God, the Son of Man," is the first to utter the
word that the spirit, i. e. he, God, has to do with no-
thing earthly and no earthly relationship, but solely
with the spirit and spiritual relationships.

Is my courage, indestructible under all the world's

blows, my inflexibility and my obduracy, perchance
already spirit in the full sense, because the world can-
not touch it ? Why, then it would not yet be at en-
mity with the world, and all its action would consist
merely in not succumbing to the world ! No, so long
as it does not busy itself with itself alone, so long as it
does not have to do with Us world, the spiritual, alone,
it is not free spirit, but only the " spirit of this world,"
the spirit fettered to it. The spirit is free spirit, i. e.
really spirit, only in a world of its own; in "this," the
earthly world, it is a stranger. Only through a spirit-
ual world is the spirit really spirit, for " this " world
does not understand it and does not know how to keep

MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 35

"the maiden from a foreign land"* from departing.

But where is it to get this spiritual world ? Where

but out of itself ? It must reveal itself; and the words
that it speaks, the revelations in which it unveils itself,
these are its world. As a visionary lives and has his
world only in the visionary pictures that he himself
creates, as a crazy man generates for himself his own
dream-world, without which he could not be crazy, so
the spirit must create for itself its spirit world, and is
not spirit till it creates it.

Thus its creations make it spirit, and by its crea-

tures we know it, the creator; in them it lives, they
are its world.

Now, what is the spirit ? It is the creator of a spi-

ritual world ! Even in you and me people do not re-
cognize spirit till they see that we have appropriated
to ourselves something spiritual,--i. e., though
thoughts may have been set before us, we have at least
brought them to life in ourselves; for, as long as we
were children, the most edifying thoughts might have
been laid before us without our wishing, or being able
to reproduce them in ourselves. So the spirit also
exists only when it creates something spiritual; it is
real only together with the spiritual, its creature.

As, then, we know it by its works, the question is

what these works are. But the works or children of
the spirit are nothing else but--spirits.

If I had before me Jews, Jews of the true metal, I

should have to stop here and leave them standing be-
fore this mystery as for almost two thousand years

* [Title of a poem by Schiller ]