It is a mistake to feel surprised that so young a man as Tieck could depict such a being. Is it not precisely at this early age, when his spiritual eyesight does not yet enable him to look abroad, that the youth is constantly occupied with all the strange things he sees when he looks into his own heart? Is it not then that he is impelled to unravel himself, to examine his own condition, to look at himself perpetually in the mirror held out to him by his own consciousness? With men of a certain disposition there is no more self-critical age than twenty or thereabouts. There is still so much of life before one then, so much time to do one's work in; one spends the days in learning to know the instrument upon which one is to play for the rest of one's life, in tuning it, or finding out how it is already tuned. The time is still distant when the mature man will seize upon that instrument, which is himself, and use it--as a violin or as a sledge-hammer, according to the requirements of the situation. And if surrounding circumstances offer neither tasks nor sustenance, and the Ego is obliged to go on living upon its own substance, the result will inevitably be the exhaustion, the demolition of the personality. What is peculiarly characteristic of author, tendency, and period, is the sentimental extravagance to which this introspection leads. In all seriousness the individual dares to make his fortuitous Ego, which has disorganised everything that established custom requires men to respect, the standard of everything, the source of all laws. Here we have unmistakably a distortion of Fichte's fundamental idea. Read the following verses from _Lovell_ and the succeeding reflection:-- "Willkommen, erhabenster Gedanke, Der hoch zum Gotte mich erhebt. Die Wesen sind, weil wir sie dachten, In trüber Ferne liegt die Welt, Es fällt in ihre dunkeln Schachten Ein Schimmer, den wir mit uns brachten. Warum sie nicht in wide Trümmer fällt? Wir sind das Schicksal, das sie aufrecht hält! Den bangen Ketten froh entronnen Geh' ich nun kühn durchs Leben him, Den harten Pflichten abgewonnen, Von feigen Thoren nur ersonnen. Die Tugend ist nur, weil ich selber bin, Ein Wiederschein in meinem innem Sinn. Was kümmern mich Gestalten, deren matten Lichtglanz ich selbst hervorgebracht? Mag Tugend sich und Laster gatten! Sie sind nur Dunst und Nebelschatten, Das Licht aus mir fällt in die finstre Nacht. Die Tugend ist nur, weil ich sie gedacht."[1] "My outer self thus rules the material, my inner self the spiritual world. Everything is subject to my will; I can call every phenomenon, every action what I please; the animate and the inanimate world are in leading-strings which are controlled by my mind; my whole life is only a dream, the many forms in which I mould according to my will. I myself am the only law in all nature, and everything obeys this law."