The French Revolution is a snowstorm falling upon trees in blossom. A transformation which promises great things is in progress, but everywhere softly and slowly. Extraordinarily valuable results are being prepared in the thoughts of men. Provided that circumstances remain even tolerably near the normal, there stands before humanity in Europe an extraordinarily desirable development. But in place of that there sets in a chaotic period of history in which the will-to-progress has to cease more or less completely from its work, and becomes a bewildered spectator. The first stage of the advance of reforming thought, thought bent with full consciousness of its aims on securing the practical and the ethical, comes to a complete stop. An experience for which it was in no wise prepared now falls to the lot of the will-to-progress. Up to this time it had always been a more or less obsolescent reality with which it had had to come to terms. In the French Revolution, however, and in the following period, it becomes familiar with a reality which has at its disposal elemental forces. Up to this time the only factor to be reckoned with had been the force of originality exercised by rational thought. In Napoleon it has to learn to recognize as power a personality with creative genius of its own. By his reorganization of France, a magnificent work but concerned only with the technical matters of administration, Napoleon creates a new State. His work, too, has had the way prepared for it by the labour of rationalism, so far as this upset the equilibrium of the old and made current the idea of something new but necessary. But the new State which now comes into existence is not the State [pg 102] which is ethical and in harmony with reason, but merely the State which works well. Its achievements compel our admiration. In the nursery garden which the will-to-progress was laying out in order to plant it with noble flowers an individual ploughs for himself a piece of ordinary arable land which at once produces an excellent crop. With the elemental creative forces of reality revealing their power in so imposing a fashion, the noble but unoriginal spirit of the age, with all its higher aims, finds itself in a state of instability from which it never completely recovers. Hegel, who saw Napoleon ride past after the Battle of Jena, tells us that he then saw the World-spirit on horseback. In these words we can hear all the confused spiritual experience of that time expressing itself. The undermining of the rationalistic world-view There now sets in a development which works against the spirit of the times, and the hitherto unopposed authority of the rational ideal is undermined. Forces in reality which are not guided by it, obtain recognition.