life must, it is true,
proceed from the higher regulating concept, and progress in the
customary rut is insufficient for it; this is an eternal truth, and,
in God's name, it crushes with undisguised contempt every one who
is so bold as to busy himself with affairs without knowing this. Yet
between the concept and the introduction of it into any individual
life there is a great gulf fixed. The filling of this gulf is the
task both of the men of affairs--who, however, must already first have
learned enough to understand you--and also of yourselves, who should
not forget life on account of the world of thought. Here you both
meet. Instead of regarding each other askance and depreciating each
other across the gulf, endeavor rather to fill it, each on his own
side, and thus seek to construct the road to union. At last, I beg
you, realize that you both are as mutually necessary to each other as
head and arm are indispensable the one to the other.

In other respects as well, these addresses adjure you, thinkers,
scholars, and authors who are still worthy of this name! Your laments
over the general shallowness, thoughtlessness, and superficiality,
over self-conceit and inexhaustible babble, over the contempt for
seriousness and profundity in all classes, may be true, even as they
actually are. Yet what class is it, pray, that has educated all these
classes, that has transformed everything pertaining to science into a
jest for them, and that has trained them from their earliest youth
in that self-conceit and that babble? Who is it, pray, who still
continues to educate the generations that have outgrown the schools?
The most obvious source of the torpor of the age is that it has read
itself torpid in the writings which you have written. Why are you,
nevertheless, so continually solicitous to amuse this idle people,
despite the fact that you know that they have learned nothing and wish
to learn nothing? Why do you call them "the Public," flatter them as
your judge, stir them up against your rivals, and seek by every means
to win this blind and confused mob over to your side? Finally, in your
literary reviews and in your magazines, why do you yourselves furnish
them with material and example for rash judgments by yourselves
judging as unconnectedly, as carelessly, as recklessly, and, for the
most part, as tastelessly as even the least of your readers could?
If you do not all think thus, and if among you there are still some
animat