ment of the human race is ascribable to this German
people.

This conviction is based on the intellectual merits of our nation, on
the freedom and the universality of the German spirit, which have ever
and again been shown in the course of its history. There is no nation
whose thinking is at once so free from prejudice and so historical as
the German, which knows how to unite so harmoniously the freedom of the
intellectual and the restraint of the practical life on the path of free
and natural development. The Germans have thus always been the
standard-bearers of free thought, but at the same time a strong bulwark
against revolutionary anarchical outbreaks. They have often been worsted
in the struggle for intellectual freedom, and poured out their best
heart's blood in the cause. Intellectual compulsion has sometimes ruled
the Germans; revolutionary tremors have shaken the life of this
people--the great peasant war in the sixteenth century, and the
political attempts at revolution in the middle of the nineteenth
century. But the revolutionary movement has been checked and directed
into the paths of a healthy natural advancement. The inevitable need of
a free intellectual self-determination has again and again disengaged
itself from the inner life of the soul of the people, and broadened into
world-historical importance.

Thus two great movements were born from the German intellectual life, on
which, henceforth, all the intellectual and moral progress of man must
rest: the Reformation and the critical philosophy. The Reformation,
which broke the intellectual yoke, imposed by the Church, which checked
all free progress; and the Critique of Pure Reason, which put a stop to
the caprice of philosophic speculation by defining for the human mind
the limitations of its capacity for knowledge, and at the same time
pointed out in what way knowledge is really possible. On this
substructure was developed the intellectual life of our time, whose
deepest significance consists in the attempt to reconcile the result of
free inquiry with the religious needs of the heart, and to lay a
foundation for the harmonious organization of mankind. Torn this way and
that, between hostile forces, in a continuous feud between faith and
knowledge, mankind seems to have lost the straight road of progress.
Reconciliation only appears possible when the thought of religious
reformation leads to a permanent explanation of the idea of religion,
and scien