mands, is no longer ABLE to command. Meanwhile, however,
there grew up in his son that new kind of harder and more dangerous
skepticism--who knows TO WHAT EXTENT it was encouraged just by
his father's hatred and the icy melancholy of a will condemned to
solitude?--the skepticism of daring manliness, which is closely related
to the genius for war and conquest, and made its first entrance into
Germany in the person of the great Frederick. This skepticism despises
and nevertheless grasps; it undermines and takes possession; it does
not believe, but it does not thereby lose itself; it gives the spirit a
dangerous liberty, but it keeps strict guard over the heart. It is the
GERMAN form of skepticism, which, as a continued Fredericianism, risen
to the highest spirituality, has kept Europe for a considerable time
under the dominion of the German spirit and its critical and historical
distrust Owing to the insuperably strong and tough masculine character
of the great German philologists and historical critics (who,
rightly estimated, were also all of them artists of destruction
and dissolution), a NEW conception of the German spirit gradually
established itself--in spite of all Romanticism in music and
philosophy--in which the leaning towards masculine skepticism was
decidedly prominent whether, for instance, as fearlessness of gaze, as
courage and sternness of the dissecting hand, or as resolute will to
dangerous voyages of discovery, to spiritualized North Pole expeditions
under barren and dangerous skies. There may be good grounds for it when
warm-blooded and superficial humanitarians cross themselves before this
spirit, CET ESPRIT FATALISTE, IRONIQUE, MEPHISTOPHELIQUE, as Michelet
calls it, not without a shudder. But if one would realize how
characteristic is this fear of the "man" in the German spirit which
awakened Europe out of its "dogmatic slumber," let us call to mind the
former conception which had to be overcome by this new one--and that
it is not so very long ago that a masculinized woman could dare, with
unbridled presumption, to recommend the Germans to the interest of
Europe as gentle, good-hearted, weak-willed, and poetical fools.
Finally, let us only understand profoundly enough Napoleon's
astonishment when he saw Goethe it reveals what had been regarded for
centuries as the "German spirit" "VOILA UN HOMME!"--that was as much as
to say "But this is a MAN! And I only expected to see a German!"

210. Supposing,