nd, and even
in the most cultivated, features are not wanting that remind us of that
dismal natural condition. It is possible for man, at one and the same
time, to unite the highest and the lowest in his nature; and if his
dignity depends on a strict separation of one from the other, his
happiness depends on a skilful removal of this separation. The culture
which is to bring his dignity into agreement with his happiness will
therefore have to provide for the greatest purity of these two principles
in their most intimate combination.

Consequently the first appearance of reason in man is not the beginning
of humanity. This is first decided by his freedom, and reason begins
first by making his sensuous dependence boundless; a phenomenon that does
not appear to me to have been sufficiently elucidated, considering its
importance and universality. We know that the reason makes itself known
to man by the demand for the absolute--the self-dependent and necessary.
But as this want of the reason cannot be satisfied in any separate or
single state of his physical life, he is obliged to leave the physical
entirely and to rise from a limited reality to ideas. But although the
true meaning of that demand of the reason is to withdraw him from the
limits of time and to lead him from the world of sense to an ideal world,
yet this same demand of reason, by misapplication--scarcely to be avoided
in this life, prone to sensuousness--can direct him to physical life,
and, instead of making man free, plunge him in the most terrible slavery.

Facts verify this supposition. Man raised on the wings of imagination
leaves the narrow limits of the present, in which mere animality is
enclosed, in order to strive on to an unlimited future. But while the
limitless is unfolded to his dazed imagination, his heart has not ceased
to live in the separate, and to serve the moment. The impulse towards
the absolute seizes him suddenly in the midst of his animality, and as in
this cloddish condition all his efforts aim only at the material and
temporal, and are limited by his individuality, he is only led by that
demand of the reason to extend his individuality into the infinite,
instead of to abstract from it. He will be led to seek instead of form
an inexhaustible matter, instead of the unchangeable an everlasting
change and an absolute securing of his temporal existence. The same
impulse which, directed to his thought and action, ought to lead to truth
an