HEINE ON GERMAN PHILOSOPHY.
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Sea,—In your number for May 8th there appears a passage from Heine quoted by a correspondent. The following may perhaps be considered apposite to the present situa- tion:—
"My revelations excited the greatest surprise in France, and I remember that leading French thinkers nsSvely confessed to me that they had always believed German philosophy to be a peculiar mystic fog behind which divinity lay hid as in a cloud, and that German philosophers wero ecstatic seers, filled with piety and the fear of God. It is not my fault that German philosophy is just the reverse of that which antil now we have called piety and fear of God, and that our latest philosophers have proclaimed absolute atheism to be the last word of German philosophy. Relentlessly and with bacchantic recklessness they tore aside the blue curtain from the Gorman heavens, and cried, Behold ! all the gods have flown, and there site only an old spinster with leaden hands and sorrowful heart—Necessity.' Alas I what sounded theirs° strange is now being preached from all the house-tops in Germany. and the fanatic zeal of many of these propagandista is terrible I "— (Confessions, 1853-54) "We were commanded to be patriotic, and straightway wo became patriots—for we always obey when our prbscar command. But it must not be supposed. that the word 'patriotism' means the same in Germany as in France. The patriotism of tau French consists in this the heart warms; through this warmth it expands; it enlarges so as to encompass, with its 011-embracing love, not only the nearest and dearest, but all France, all civilization. The patriotism of the Germans, on the contrary, consists in narrowing and contracting the heart, just as leather contracts in the cold ; in hating foreigners; in ceasing to be European and cosmopolitan, and in adopting a narrow-minded and exclusive Germanism."—(The Romantic School, 1833).
Should I apologize for the length of these quotations P Even so, they are like single bricks displayed as samples of a
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