< prev
next>
112
THE EGO AND HIS OWN
Cognition has its object in life. German thought
seeks, more than that of others, to reach the begin-
nings and fountain-heads of life, and sees no life till it
sees it in cognition itself. Descartes's cogito, ergo
sum has the meaning " One lives only when one
thinks." Thinking life is called " intellectual life " !
Only mind lives, its life is the true life. Then, just so
in nature only the " eternal laws," the mind or the
reason of nature, are its true life. In man, as in na-
ture, only the thought lives; everything else is dead !
To this abstraction, to the life of generalities or of
that which is lifeless, the history of mind had to come.
God, who is spirit, alone lives. Nothing lives but the
ghost.
How can one try to assert of modern philosophy or
modern times that they have reached freedom, since
they have not freed us from the power of objectivity ?
Or am I perhaps free from a despot when I am not
afraid of the personal potentate, to be sure, but of
every infraction of the loving reverence which I fancy
I owe him ? The case is the same with modern times.
They only changed the existing objects, the real ruler,
etc., into conceived objects, i. e. into ideas, before
which the old respect not only was not lost, but in-
creased in intensity. Even if people snapped their fin-
gers, at God and the devil in their former crass reality,
people devoted only the greater attention to their
ideas. " They are rid of the Evil One; evil is left."*
The decision having once been made not to let oneself
be imposed on any longer by the extant and palpable,
[Parodied from the words of Mephistopheles in the witch's kitchen in
" Faust " ]
MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 113
little scruple was felt about revolting against the exist-
ing State or overturning the existing laws; but to sin
' against the idea of the State, not to submit to the idea
of law, who would have dared that ? So one re-
mained a " citizen " and a " law-respecting," loyal
man; yes, one seemed to himself to be only so much
more law-respecting, the more rationalistically one
abrogated the former defective law in order to do hom-
age to the " spirit of the law." In all this the objects
had only suffered a change of form ; they had re-
mained in their prepollence and pre-eminence; in
short, one was still involved in obedience and pos-
sessedness, lived in reflection, and had an object on
which one reflected, which one respected, and before
which one felt reverence and fear. One had done no-
thing but transform the things into conceptions of the
things, into thoughts and ideas, whereby one's depend-
ence became all the more intimate and indissoluble.
So, e. g., it is not hard to emancipate oneself from the
commands of parents, or to set aside the admonitions
of uncle and aunt, the entreaties of brother and sister ;
but the renounced obedience easily gets into one's con-
science, and the less one does give way to the individ-
ual demands, because he rationalistically, by his own
reason, recognizes them to be unreasonable, so much
the more conscientiously does he hold fast to filial
piety and family love, and so much the harder is it for
him to forgive himself a trespass against the conception
which he has formed of family love and of filial duty.
Released from dependence as regards the existing
family, one falls into the more binding dependence on
the idea of the family; one is ruled by the spirit of