Its germ is contained in Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_, and we can clearly trace the mental processes by which _Wilhelm Meister_ is slowly transmuted into _Heinrich von Ofterdingen_. Wilhelm does not act, he is acted upon. He does not strive, he longs. He pursues ideals, seeking them first on the stage, then in real life. Wilhelm too, is the offspring of "soul." The book is pervaded by soul. It is not only that the characters, like those of many modern English novels (some of Dickens's, for instance), are full of soul, but there is, as it were, soul in the peculiar, hazy atmosphere which surrounds them. No feature is realistically coarse or decided; the children of soul have soft contours. Heiberg once summed up Goethe's philosophy, of which he himself was a disciple, in the following sentence: "Goethe is neither immoral nor irreligious, in the general acceptation of the word, but he shows that there are no unconditional laws of duty, and that we must place our religion on the same level as our poetry and philosophy." We are struck in reading _Wilhelm Meister_ by the manner in which rigid school or text-book ethics, the narrow-minded, conventional ideas of morality and equity, are so re-moulded that morality is no longer regarded as the absolute law of life, but simply as an important principle of life, one among others all equally legitimate and equally under control--just as the brain of the animal, important as it is, is not, in the estimation of the physiologist, the one part of consequence, but simply an organ, fulfilling its task in association with the heart, the liver, and the other organs. Hence sensuality is not abused as animal, but (in Philine) simply and straightforwardly represented as pleasant and attractive. The harmonious development of Wilhelm's nature is arrived at by the aid of many doubtful experiences. In the female characters we are called on to admire well-bred self-possession and the innate nobility of a beautiful nature; the physical and mental superiority and freedom which are the result of a highly favoured and assured position, are sympathetically portrayed in the personages of rank. It may seem objectionable to us nowadays that "noble" and "aristocratic" are evidently often regarded as synonyms, but the reason for it is to be sought in the deplorable, straitened social conditions of the Germany of Goethe's day. As the tale is not the offspring of the union of imagination and reality, but of imagination and "soul," there is something unreal in its whole character; much is veiled, much refined away; everything is so idealised that the material world stands, as it were, in the shadow of the spiritual.