The Value of Thinking II

”...For a long time now, although from a considerable distance, I have observed the course of your mind and noted the path you have mapped out with ever-renewed admiration. You seek what is necessary in nature, but you seek it by the most difficult route, which any weaker force would do well to avoid. You take all of nature together to get light on the individual; in the totality of its manifestations you seek the explanation for the individual. From the simple organization you ascend, step by step, to the more complicated, to finally build the most complicated of all, the human being, genetically from the materials of the whole of nature. By recreating it, as it were, you seek to penetrate its hidden technology. A great and truly heroic idea, which shows sufficiently how much your mind holds the rich totality of its ideas together in a beautiful unity. You could never have hoped that your life would be enough for such a goal, but even just to embark on such a path is worth more than any other ending, and you have chosen, like Achilles in the Iliad between Phthia and immortality. If you had been born a Greek, or even an Italian, and had been surrounded from your cradle by a refined nature and idealizing art, your path would have been infinitely shortened, perhaps even made superfluous. You would have absorbed the form of the necessary into your first view of things, and the great style would have developed in you with your first experiences. Now that you have been born a German, since your Greek spirit has been thrown into this Nordic creation, you had no choice but to either become a Nordic artist yourself or to replace what reality withheld from your imagination by the help of your thinking power, and thus to give birth to a Greece from within and in a rational way, so to speak. In that period of your life when the soul forms its inner world from the outer world, surrounded by imperfect forms, you had already absorbed a wild and Nordic nature into yourself, when your victorious genius, superior to its material, discovered this defect from within, and from without it was confirmed by your acquaintance with Greek nature. Now you had to correct the old, inferior nature, which had already been forced upon your imagination, according to the better model that your creative mind created for itself, and this could not, of course, be done otherwise than according to guiding concepts. But this logical direction, which the mind is compelled to take in reflection, does not go well with the aesthetic one, through which alone it forms. So you had more work to do, because just as you went from intuition to abstraction, you now had to convert concepts back into intuitions, and transform thoughts into feelings, because only through these can the genius bring forth... “