tes
its sense of will.

Devotion, receptivity, the feeling for Nature, comprehension, the
passion for truth, meditative depth, spiritual love, are the fairest
gifts that can be granted to any people, and to us they have been
granted. But they exclude other gifts, which stand to-day in high
repute, and which we affect in vain. They exclude the capacity for
shaping forms and standards, the aptitude for rule, if not even for
self-government; in any case the qualities which go to the creation of
nationalities and civilizations.

It is no mere accident that in not one of the hundredfold provinces of
life, from art to military organization, from State-craft to
jointstock-companies, from saintliness to table-utensils, have we
Germans discovered a single essential and enduring form. And again,
there is scarcely one of these forms which we have not filled with a
richer and more living content than those who first discovered it.

For whoever bears the All within himself can be satisfied with no
form; he finds in himself at once vision and reality, thesis and
antithesis. He seeks for a synthesis, but all form is one-sided. He
conceives, chooses, comprehends, fulfils, breaks in pieces and throws
away. He remains a unity in constant change, like the year as it
proceeds day by day, hour by hour, and no two of them alike. He does
not force things--out of respect for creation.

But he who makes forms must use force. He makes himself the standard
and comprehends himself only. Everything else, everything that is
extra-normal, unconformable, unintelligible and not understood remains
for him something alien, trivial, inferior, or negligible. The maker
of forms can rule, even by compulsion, without being a tyrant, for he
is convinced of the value of what he brings and knows no doubts. He is
ruthless, yet only up to a certain limit, which is determined by his
sense of the inferiority of the other. The man who rejects forms,
however, cannot rule; the very penetration into the domain of another
seems to him a wrong to his own, the basis of which is recognition and
allowance. If he is forced to penetrate, he loses all balance, for in
wrong-doing he understands no gradations. Similarly he is incapable of
civilizing, for he cannot take forms seriously; he violates them
himself--how can he impose them upon others? In his inmost soul he is
naive, for creation is seething in him; but in execution he is
conscious, critical, eclectic and methodic