Schillers Philosophical Letters | Page 9

Let us become intimate with the
high ideal unit, and we shall be drawn to one another in brotherly love.
If we plant beauty and joy we shall reap beauty and joy. If we think
clearly we shall love ardently. "Be ye perfect, as your Father in heaven
is perfect," says the Founder of our Faith. Weak human nature turned
pale at this command, therefore He explained himself in clearer terms:
"Love one another!"
Wisdom, with thy sunlike look, Awful goddess! turn thee back, And
give way to Love; Who before thee went, with hero heart, Up the steep
and stormy path To the Godhead's very throne; Who, unveiling the
Holiest, Showed to thee Elysium Through the vaulted sepulchre. Did it
not invite us in? Could we reach immortality-- Or could we seek the
spirit Without Love, the spirit's master? Love, Love leadeth only to
Nature's Father, Only love the spirits.
I have now given you, Raphael, my spirit's confession of faith--a flying
outline of the creation I have undertaken. As you may perceive, the
seed which you scattered in my soul took root. Mock, or rejoice, or
blush at your scholar, as you please. Certain it is this philosophy has
ennobled my heart, and extended and beautified the perspective of my

life. It is possible, my excellent friend, that the entire structure of my
conclusions may have been a baseless and visionary edifice. Perhaps
the world, as I depicted it, nowhere exists, save in the brain of your
Julius. Perhaps, after the lapse of thousands on thousands of years,
when the wiser Judge promised in the future, sits on the judgment-seat,
at the sight of the true original, filled with confusion, I should tear in
pieces my schoolboy's design. All this may happen--I expect it; and
even if not a vestige of reality is found in my dream, the reality will fill
me with proportionately greater delight and wonder. Ought my ideas to
be more beautiful than those of the Creator? How so? Could we tolerate
that His exalted artistic structure should fall beneath the expectations of
a mortal connoisseur? This is exactly the fiery probation of His great
perfection, and the sweetest triumph for the Exalted Spirit, that false
conclusions and deception do not injure His acknowledgment; that all
tortuous deviations of the wandering reason at length strike into the
straight road of everlasting truth; that all diverging arms and currents
ultimately meet in the main stream. What an idea, Raphael, I form of
the Great Artist, who, differently travestied in a thousand copies, still
retains identical features in all this diversity, from which even the
depreciating hand of a blunderer cannot remove admiration.
Moreover, my representation may certainly be fallacious, wholly an
invention,--nay, I am persuaded that it must necessarily be so; and yet it
is possible that all results of this may come to pass. All great sages are
agreed that our whole knowledge moves on ultimately to a
conventional deception, with which, however, the strictest truth can
co-exist. Our purest ideas are by no means images of things, but only
their signs or symbols determined by necessity, and co-existing with
them.
Neither God, nor the human soul, nor the world are really what we
consider them. Our thoughts of these are only the endemic forms in
which the planet we inhabit hands them to us. Our brain belongs to this
planet; accordingly, also, the idioms of our ideas, which are treasured
up in it. But the power of the soul is peculiar, necessary, and always
consistent: the capricious nature of the materials through which it finds
expression changes nothing in the eternal laws, as long as this

capriciousness does not stand in contradiction with itself, and so long
as the sign remains true to the thing it designates. As the thinking
power develops the relations of the idioms, these relations of things
must also really be present in them. Therefore, truth is no property of
the idioms, but of the conclusion; it is not the likeness of the sign with
the thing signified, of the conception with the object; but the agreement
of this conception with the laws of thought. In a similar manner, the
doctrine of quantity makes use of cyphers which are nowhere present,
except upon paper, and yet it finds with them what is present in the
world of reality. For example, what resemblance is there between the
letters A and B, the signs : and =, +, and -, and the fact that has to be
ascertained? Yet the comet, foretold centuries before, advances from a
remote corner of the heavens and the expected planet eclipses the disk
at the proper time. Trusting to the infallibility of his calculation, the
discoverer Columbus plunges into unknown regions of the sea to seek
the missing