Goethe's
Hellenism was of another order, the Allgemeinheit and Heiterkeit, the
completeness and serenity, of a watchful, exigent intellectualism. Im
Ganzen, Guten, Wahren, resolut zu leben--is Goethe's description of his
own higher life; and what is meant by life in the whole--im Ganzen? It
means the life of one for whom, over and over again, what was once
precious has become indifferent. Every one who aims at the life of
culture is met by many forms of it, arising out of the intense,
laborious, one-sided development of some special talent. They are the
brightest enthusiasms the world has to show. It is not their part to
weigh the claims which this or that alien form of culture makes upon
them. But the pure instinct of self-culture cares not so much to reap all
that these forms of culture can give, as to find in them its own
strength. The demand of the intellect is to feel itself alive. It must
see into the laws, the operation, the intellectual reward of every
divided form of culture; but only that it may measure the relation
between itself and them.
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