"While all other Indo-European languages allow a wide liberty in placing the accent and make external considerations, such as the quantity of the syllables and euphony, of deciding influence, the Germanic tribes show a remarkable and intentional transition to an internal principle of accentuation. . . . Of all related peoples the Germanic alone puts the accent on the root syllable of the word, that is, on the part that gives it its meaning. There is hardly an ethnological fact extant which gives so much food for thought as this. What leads these people to give up a habit which must have been so old that it had become instinctive, and to evolve out of their own minds a principle which indicates a power of discrimination far in advance of anything we are used to attribute to the lower stages of civilization? Circumstances of which we are not now aware must have compelled them to distinguish the inner essence of things from their external form, and must have taught them to appreciate the former as of higher, indeed as of sole, importance. It is this accentuation of the real substance of things, the ever-powerful desire to discover this real substance, and the ever-present impulse to give expression to this inner reality which has become the controlling trait of the Germanic soul. Hence the conviction gained by countless unfruitful efforts, that reason alone will never get at the true foundation of things; hence the thoroughness of German science; hence a great many of the qualities that explain Germanic successes and failures; hence, perhaps, a certain stubbornness and obstinacy, the unwillingness to give up a conviction once formed; hence the tendency to mysticism; hence that continuous struggle which marks the history of German art,--the struggle to give to the contents powerful and adequate expression, and to satisfy at the same time the requirements of esthetic elegance and beauty, a struggle in which the victory is ever on the side of truth, though it be homely, over beauty of form whenever it appears deceitful; hence the part played by music as the only expression of those imponderable vibrations of the soul for which language seems to have no words; hence the faith of the German in his mission among the nations as a bringer of truth, as a recognizer of the real value of things as against the hollow shell of beautiful form, as the doer of right deeds for their own sake and not for any reward beyond the natural outcome of the deed itself."