Schillers Philosophical Letters | Page 4

of seeing in our separation a slight sacrifice whose merit
may win from fate the reward of our future reunion. You did not yet
know what privation was. You suffer for the first time.
And yet it is perhaps an advantage for you that I have been torn from
you exactly at this time. You have to endure a malady, from which you
can only perfectly recover by your own energy, so as not to suffer a
relapse. The more deserted you feel, the more you will stir up all
healing power in yourself, and in proportion as you derive little or no
benefit from temporary and deceptive palliatives, the more certainly
will you succeed in eradicating the evil fundamentally.
I do not repent that I roused you from your dream, though your present
position is painful. I have done nothing more than hasten a crisis, which
every soul like yours has sooner or later to pass through, and where the
essential thing is, at what time of life it is endured. There are times and
seasons when it is terrible to doubt truth and virtue. Woe to the man
who has to fight through the quibbles of a self-sufficient reason while
he is immersed in the storms of the passions. I have felt in its fulness all

that is expressed by this, and, to preserve you from similar troubles I
could devise no means but to ward off the pestilence by timely
inoculation.
Nor could I, my dear Julius, choose a more propitious time? I met you
in the full and glorious bloom of youthful intelligence and bodily vigor,
before you had been oppressed by care or enchained by passion; fully
prepared, in your freedom and strength, to stand the great fight, of
which a sublime tranquillity, produced by conviction, is the prize.
Truth and error had not yet been interwoven with your interests. Your
enjoyments and virtues were independent of both. You required no
images of terror to tear you from low dissipation. The feeling for nobler
joys had made these odious to you. You were good from instinct and
from unconsecrated moral grace. I had nothing to fear for your morality,
if a building crumbled down on which it was not founded. Nor do your
anxieties alarm me, though you may conjure up many dark
anticipations in your melancholy mood. I know you better, Julius!
You are ungrateful, too! You despise the reason, and forget what joys it
has procured you. Though you might have escaped the dangers of
doubt all your life, still it was my duty not to deprive you of the
pleasures which you were capable of enjoying. The height at which you
were was not worthy of you. The way up which you climbed gave you
compensation for all of which I deprived you. I still recall the
delight--with what delight you blessed the moment when the bandage
dropped from your eyes! The warmth with which you grasped the truth
possibly may have led your all-devouring imagination to an abyss at
sight of which you draw back shuddering.
I must follow the course of your inquiries to discover the sources of
your complaints. You have written down the results of your thoughts:
send me these papers and then I will answer you.

LETTER IV.
Julius to Raphael.

I have been looking over my papers this morning. Among them I have
found a lost memorandum written down in those happy hours when I
was inspired with a proud enthusiasm. But on looking over it how
different seem all the things treated of! My former views look like the
gloomy boarding of a playhouse when the lights have been removed.
My heart sought a philosophy, and imagination substituted her dreams.
I took the warmest for the truest coloring.
I seek for the laws of spirits--I soar up to the infinite, but I forget to
prove that they really exist. A bold attack of materialism overthrows
my creation.
You will read through this fragment, my dear Raphael. Would that you
could succeed in kindling once again the extinct flames of my
enthusiasm, to reconcile me again to my genius! but my pride has sunk
so low that even Raphael's friendly hand can hardly raise me up again.

THEOSOPHY OF JULILTS.
THE WORLD AND THE THINKING BEING.
The universe is a thought of God. After this ideal thought-fabric passed
out into reality, and the new-born world fulfilled the plan of its
Creator--permit me to use this human simile--the first duty of all
thinking beings has been to retrace the original design in this great
reality; to find the principle in the mechanism, the unity in the
compound, the law in the phenomenon, and to pass back from the
structure to its primitive foundation. Accordingly to me there