[101:A] Chamberlain, for example, holds that Jesus must have
been of Teutonic birth--a perfect logical conclusion from the
received philosophy of the State and religion. Quite aware
that there is much Slav blood in northern Germany and Romance
blood in southern Germany, he explains that while with other
peoples crossing produces a mongrel race, the potency of the
German blood is such that cross-breeding strengthens it. While
at one time he explains the historic strength of the Jew on
the ground that he has kept his race pure, another place he
allows his indignation at the Jews to lead him to include them
among the most mongrel of all peoples. To one thing he remains
consistent: By the very essence of race, the Semites represent
a metaphysical principle inherently hostile to the grand
Germanic principle. It perhaps seems absurd to dignify the
vagaries of this garrulous writer, but according to all report
the volumes in which such expressions occur, "The Foundations
of the Nineteenth Century," has had august approval and much
vogue.
At the beginning of history Fichte placed an "_Urvolk_." His account of
it seems an attempt to rationalize at one stroke the legends of the
Golden Age, the Biblical account of man before the Fall and Rousseau's
primitive "state of nature." The _Urvolk_ lived in a paradise of
innocence, a paradise without knowledge, labor or art. The philosophy
which demands such a Folk is comparatively simple. Except as a
manifestation of Absolute Reason, humanity could not exist at all. Yet
in the first stage of the manifestation, Reason could not have been
appropriated by the self-conscious effort of man. It existed without
consciousness of itself, for it was given, not, like all true
self-consciousness, won by morally creative struggle. Rational in
substance, in form it was but feeling or instinct. In a sense, all
subsequent history is but a return to this primitive condition. But
"humanity must make the journey on its own feet; by its own strength it
must bring itself back to that state in which it was once without its
own cooperating labor. . . . If humanity does not recreate its own true
being, it has no real life." While philosophy compels us to assume a
Normal People who, by "the mere fact of their existence, without science
and art, found themselves in a state of perfectly developed reason,"
there is no ground for not admitting the existence at the same time of
"timid and rude earth-born savages." Thus the original state of humanity
would have been one of the greatest possible inequality, being divided
between the Normal Folk existing as a manifestation of Reason and the
wild and savage races of barbarism.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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