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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
[First published in Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz (Twenty-One Sheets from Switzerland), ed. Georg Herwegh (Zurich and Winterthur, 1843).]
If it is true that our time still suffers from the contrast between theory and praxis, that the objective world, which the present has inherited from the past, is in conflict with the subjective world of our modern feelings and ideas – then this sickness is nowhere as dangerous, this contrast nowhere as sharp, as in Germany.
To what depth of sensitivity, to what clarity of consciousness, have the masters of German literature educated the spirit and disposition of their countrymen! In the heaven of our ideas no prejudice and no hate prevail: here, man's dignity is acknowledged to the fullest, his eternal rights proclaimed; here, all men are brothers and members of one family, here no institutions originating in the blind egoism of barbaric times exist and absolute equality rules supreme; how many sophisms are brought forward to reconcile the egoism which is incorporated in our external world with this absolute equality of men, how much pain is taken to paper over the chasm between what is essential in man and what is accidental in him, to confuse the normal with the abnormal, the true nature of man – spirit – with his still false, raw nature – all in order to reach the conclusion that there are as many human natures as there are different individuals.
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