Multiplicity.-The exclusive, sole, and egoistic, can only take and never give: it can only let itself be born, but cannot bear; for bearing there is need of I and Thou, the passing over of Egoism into Communism. The richest procreative force lies therefore in the utmost multiplicity; and when Earth-nature had emanated to the most manifold variety, she attained therewith the state of saturation, of self-contentment, of self-delight, which she manifests amid her present harmony. She works no longer by titanic, total transformations, for her period of revolutions is foreby; she now is all that she can be, and thus that she ever could have been, and ever must become. She no longer has to lavish life-force on barren impotence; throughout her endless-stretching realm she has summoned multiformity, the Manly and the Womanly, the ever self-renewing and engendering, the ever self-completing and assuaging, into hife,-and in this eternal harmony of parts, she has become forevermore her stable self.
It is in the reproduction of this great evolutionary process of Nature in Man himself, that the human race, from the time of its self-severance from Nature, is thus involved. The same necessity is the mainspring of the great revolution of mankind; the same assuagement will bring this revolution to its close.
But that impelling force, the plain and innate force of Life which vindicates itself in life-needs, is unconscious and instinctive by its very nature; and where it is this-in the Folk-it also is the only true, conclusive might. Great, then, is the error of our folk. instructors when they fancy that the Folk must know first what it wills-i.e. in their eyes should will -ere it be justified,. or even able, to will at all. From this chief error all the wretched makeshifts, all the impotent devices, and all the shameful weakness of the latest world-commotions take their rise.
The truly known is nothing other than the actual physical phenomenon, become by thought the vivid presentation of an object. Thought is arbitrary so long as it cannot picture to itself the physical present and that which has passed away from sense, with the completest unconditional perception of their necessary coherence ('Zusammenhang'); for the consciousness of this conception ('Vorstellung') is the essence of all reasonable Knowledge ('vernünftiges Wissen'). Therefore the more truthful is Knowledge, the more frankly must it recognise that its whole existence hangs upon its own coherence with that which has come to actual, finished, and fulfilled manifestation to the senses, and thus admit its own possibility of existence as a priori conditioned by actuality. But so soon as Thought abstracts from actuality, and would fain construct the concrete future, it can no longer bring forth Knowledge; but utters itself as Fancy ('Wähnen'), which forcibly dissevers itself from the Unconscious. Only when it can fathom physicality, and unflinchingly plunge its sympathetic gaze into the depths of an actual physical need, can it take its share in the energy of the Unconscious; and only that which is brought to light of day by an instinctive, necessary Need, to wit the actual physical Deed, can again become the satisfying object of thought and knowledge. For the march of human evolution is the rational and natural progress from the unconscious to the conscious, from un-knowledge to knowledge, from need to satisfying; and not from satisfaction back to need,-at least not to that selfsame need whose end lay in that satisfying.
Not ye wise men, therefore, are the true inventors, but the Folk; for Want it was, that drove it to invention. All great inventions are the People's deed; whereas the devisings of the intellect are but the exploitations, the derivatives, nay, the splinterings and disfigurements of the great inventions of the Folk. Not ye, invented Speech, but the Folk; ye could but spoil its physical beauty, break its force, mislay its inner understanding, and painfully explore the loss. Not ye, were the inventors of Religion, but the Folk; ye could but mutilate its inner meaning, turn the heaven that lay within it to a hell, and its out-breathing truth to lies. Not ye are the inventors of the State; ye have but made from out the natural alliance of like-needing men a natureless and forced allegiance of unlike- needing; from the beneficent defensive league of all a maleficent bulwark for the privileged few; from the soft and yielding raiment upon man's blithely moving body a stiff, encumbering iron harness, the gaud of some historic armoury. It is not ye that give the Folk the wherewithal to live, but it gives you; not ye who give the Folk to think, but it gives you. Therefore it is not ye that should presume to teach the Folk, but ye should take your lessons from it; and thus it is to you that I address myself; not to the Folk,-for to it there are but scant words to say, and e'en the exhortation: 'Do as thou must!' to it is quite superfluous, for of itself it does that which it must. But to you I turn,-in the same sense as the Folk, albeit of necessity in your own mode of utterance,-to you, ye prudent men and intellectual, to offer you, with all the People's open-heartedness, the redemption from your egoistic incantations in the limpid spring of Nature, in the loving arm-caresses of the Folk-there where I found it; where it became for me my art-instructor; where, after many a battle between the hope within and the blank despair without, I won a dauntless faith in the assurance of the Future.
The Folk will thus fulfil its mission of redemption, the while it satisfies itself and at like time rescues its own foes. Its procedure will be governed by the instinctive laws of Nature; with the Necessity of elemental forces, will it destroy the bad coherence that alone makes out the conditions of Un-nature's rule. So long as these conditions last, so long as they suck out their life-sap from the squandered powers of the People, so long as they-themselves unable to create-bootlessly consume the productive faculties of the Folk for their own egoistic maintenance,- so long too will all showing, doing, changing, bettering, and reforming, (3) be naught but wilful, aimless, and unfruitful. But the Folk has only to deny by deeds that thing which in very deed is no-thing-to wit, is needless, superfluous, and null; it requires thus to merely know what thing it wills not,-and this its own instinctive life-bent teaches it; it needs but to turn this Willed-not to a Non-existing, and by the force of its own Want to annihilate what is fit for nothing but annihilation; and then the Some-thing of the fathomed Future will stand before it of itself.
Are the conditions heaved away, which sanction Superfluity to feed upon the marrow of Necessity: then of themselves arise the conditions which call the necessary, the true, the imperishable, to life. Are the conditions heaved away, which permit the continuance of the need of Luxury: then of themselves are given the conditions which allow the stilling of the necessary need of man in the teeming overflow of Nature and of his own productive human faculties, in unimaginably rich but ever fitting measure. And yet once more,-are the conditions of the tyranny of Fashion heaved away: then of themselves are the- conditions of True Art at hand; and with one waive of the enchanter's wand, will holy, glorious Art, the daughter of the noblest Manhood, blossom in like fulness and perfection with Mother Nature, the conditions of whose now completed harmony of form have issued from the birth-pangs of the elements. Like to this blissful harmony of Nature, will she endure and ever show her fruitfulness, as the purest and most perfect satisfaction of the truest, noblest need of perfected mankind; i.e. of men who are all that which of their essence they can be, and therefore should and shall be.
5. THE ART-ANTAGONISTIC SHAPE OF PRESENT LIFE, UNDER THE SWAY OF ABSTRACT THOUGHT AND FASHION.
The first beginning and foundation of all that exists and all that is conceivable, is actual physical being. The inner recognition of his life-need as the common life-need of his Species, in contradistinction to Nature and all her countless living species that lie apart from Man,-is the beginning and foundation of man's Thinking. Thought is therefore the faculty possessed by Man, not merely to sense the actual and physical from its external aspect, but to distinguish all its parts according to their essence, and finally to grasp and picture to himself their intimate connection. The idea ('Begriff') of a thing is the image formed in Thought of its actual substance; the portrayal of the images of all discernible substances in one joint-image, in which the faculty of Thought presents to itself the picture of the essence of all realities in their connected sequence, is the work of the highest energy of the human soul,-the Spirit ('Geist'). If in this joint-image man must necessarily have included the image, the idea, of his own being also,- nay, if this his own prefigured being must be, before all else, the artistic force that pictures forth the whole conceptual art-work : then does this force, with all its joint portrayal of each reality, proceed alone from the real, physical man; and thus, at bottom, from his life-need, and finally from that which summoned forth this life- need, the physical reality of Nature. But where Thought casts aside this linking cable; where, after doubled and again redoubled presentment of itself, it fain would look upon itself as its original cause; where Mind ('Geist') instead of as the last and most conditioned, would conceive itself as the first and least conditioned energy ('Thätigkeit'), and therefore as the ground and cause of Nature,-there also is the fly-wheel of Necessity upheaved, and blind Caprice runs headlong- free, -boundless, and unfettered, as our metaphysicians fancy-through the workshops of the brain, and hurls herself; a raging stream of madness, upon the world of actuality.
If Mind has manufactured Nature, if Thought has made the Actual, if the Philosopher comes before the Man: then Nature, Actuality and Man are no more necessary, and their existence is not only superfluous but even harmful; for the greatest superfluity of all is the lagging of the Incomplete when once the Complete has come to being. In this wise Nature, Actuality and Man would only then have any meaning, or any pretext for their presence,
