who form the exception! Confirm, strengthen, counsel
in this matter the younger generation, which reverently looks up to
you. And the rest of you also, who are average souls, they adjure!
If you are not to help, at least do not interfere, this time; do not
again--as always hitherto--put yourselves in the way with your wisdom
and with your thousand hesitations. This thing, like every rational
thing in the world, is not complicated, but simple; and it also
belongs among the thousand matters which you know not. If your wisdom
could save, it would surely have saved us before; for it is you who
have counseled us thus far. Now, like everything else, all this is
forgiven you, and you should no longer be reproached with it. Only
learn at last once to know yourselves, and be silent.

These addresses adjure you men of affairs! With few exceptions you
have thus far been cordially hostile to abstract thought and to all
learning which desired to be something for itself, even though you
demeaned yourselves as if you merely haughtily despised all this.
As far as you possibly could, you held from you the men who did such
things as well as their propositions; the reproach of lunacy, or the
advice that they be sent to the mad-house, was the thanks from you on
which they might usually count. They, in their turn, did not venture
to express themselves regarding you with the same frankness, since
they were dependent upon you; but their innermost thought was this,
that, with a few exceptions, you were shallow babblers and inflated
braggarts, dilettante who have only passed through school, blind
gropers and creepers in the old rut who had neither wish nor ability
for aught else. Give them the lie through your deeds, and to this end
grasp the opportunity now offered you; lay aside that contempt for
profound thought and learning; let yourselves be advised and hear and
learn what you do not know, or else your accusers win their case.

These addresses adjure you, thinkers, scholars, and authors who are
still worthy of this name! In a certain sense that reproach of the men
of affairs was not unjust. You often proceeded too unconcerned in
the realm of abstract thought, without troubling yourselves about the
actual world and without considering how the one might be connected
with the other; you circumscribed your own world for yourselves, and
let the real world lie to one side, disdained and despised. Every
regulation and every formation of actual