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✓ 1830]

EXTRACTS

349

"I, for my share, cannot understand how men have made themselves believe that God speaks to us through books and histories. The man to whom the universe does not reveal directly what relation it has to him, whose heart does not tell him what he owes himself and others, that man will scarcely learn it out of books, which generally do little more than give our errors names."

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Wilhelm Meister.

"Every one of my writings has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, a thousand different things, the learned and the ignorant, the wise and the foolish, infancy and age have come in turn, generally without having the least suspicion of it, to bring me the offering of their thoughts, their faculties, their experience; often they have sowed the harvest I have reaped; my work is that of an aggregation of beings taken from the whole of nature; it bears the name of Goethe."

"The smallest production of nature has the circle of its completeness within itself, and I have only need of eyes to see with, in order to discover the relative proportions. I am perfectly

sure that within this circle, however narrow, an entirely genuine existence is enclosed. A work of art, on the other hand, has its completeness out of itself; the Best lies in the Idea of the artist which he seldom or never reaches; all the rest lies in certain conventional rules which are indeed derived from the nature of art and of mechanical processes, but still are not so easy to decipher as the laws of living nature. In works of art, there is much that is traditional; the works of nature are ever a freshly uttered word of God." GOETHE.

"The great man is he who hath nothing to fear and nothing to hope from another. It is he who, while he demonstrates the iniquity of the laws and is able to correct them, obeys them peaceably. It is he who looks on the ambitious both as weak and fraudulent. It is he who hath no disposition or occasion for any kind of deceit, no reason for being or for appearing different from what he is. It is he who can call together the most select company when it pleases him." My thoughts are my company.

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LANDOR.

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1830]

EXTRACTS

351

"Character is a perfectly educated will."

NOVALIS.

"The gift of bearing to be contradicted, is, generally speaking, possessed only by the dead... LESSING.

[A very long extract from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, the Wanderjabre, on the three true religions is given.

Then follows (from Lee's Life of Cuvier) this statement of his fourfold division of the animal kingdom.]

"There exist in nature four principal forms or general plans according to which all animals seem to have been modelled, and the ulterior divisions of which, whatever name the naturalist may apply to them, are comparatively but slight modifications founded on the development or addition of certain parts which do not change the essence of the plan."

1. Man, and animals like him; 2. Molluscous animals;

3. Insects and worms;

4. Radiated animals.

"Cuvier rejects the idea of a scale of beings as not founded in nature, but urges the 'necessity of considering each being, each group of beings, by itself, and not to make abstraction of any of its affinities or any of the links which attach it either to the beings nearest to it or the most distant from it.' The True method is to view each being in the midst of all others: it shows all the radiations by which it is more or less closely linked with that immense net-work which constitutes organized nature."

LEE'S Life of Cuvier.

JOURNAL XXII

FROM Y

1831

January 10, 1831.

... I AM not to help my neighbour because he is importunate, nor because he wants; (that does not express his claim on me) but because he is God's creature, as I am: and I have received all, and only hold all I have as occasion of exercising affections. His claim on me is through God, but this claim is nearest of any, for the Bible teaches us that God is in us, and in all, and there is therefore something in him which is another and the same as myself. I find myself in my neighbour, and the object of a charity is not to relieve want as an end, but by means of relieving that want, to justify myself to himself, or to fill both of us with God's approbation. He only is a perfect man through whom God's spirit blows unobstructed, who seeks with all his powers God's ends, seeks usefulness with every muscle, seeks truth in every thought.

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