VI. The Age of Kant and Goethe

> There is nowhere anything permanent, neither within myself nor outside, but there is only a never ceasing change. Nowhere do I know of any being, not even of my own being. I, myself, do not know at all, and I am not. Pictures are; they are the only thing that is, and they know of themselves after the fashion of pictures; hovering pictures that pass by, without anything that they pass: interconnected through pictures of pictures, pictures without anything that is depicted in them, without meaning and purpose. I, myself, am one of these pictures; in fact, I am not even that but only a confused picture of pictures. All reality is changed into a strange dream without a life of which to dream, without a spirit to do the dreaming; it changes into a dream, which is held together by a dream of itself. Seeing—this is the dream; thinking—the source of all beings, of all reality, which I imagine, of my being, my strength of my purposes. This is the dream of that dream.