We may doubt whether if Shelley had lived longer he would ever have risen above emotional sophistry and become more ethical in the quality of his imagination. Such a progress from emotional sophistry to ethical insight we actually find in Goethe; and this is the last and most complex case we have to consider. Johnson, I have said, is wise without being poetical and Keats poetical without being wise; Sophocles is both poetical and wise, whereas Shelley is poetical, but with a taint of sophistry or sham wisdom. No such clear-cut generalization can be ventured about Goethe. I have already quoted Goethe’s own judgment on his “Werther” as weakness seeking to give itself the prestige of strength, and perhaps it would be possible to instance from his early writings even worse examples of a morbid emotionalism (e.g. “Stella”). How about “Faust” itself? Most Germans will simply dismiss such a question as profane. With Hermann Grimm they are ready to pronounce “Faust” the greatest work of the greatest poet of all times, and of all peoples. Yet it is not easy to overlook the sophistical element in both parts of “Faust.” I have already commented on those passages that would seem especially sophistical: the passage in which the devil is defined as the spirit that always says no strikes at the very root of any proper distinction between good and evil. The passage again in which Faust breaks down all precise discrimination in favor of mere emotional intoxication is an extreme example of the Rousseauistic art of “making madness beautiful.” The very conclusion of the whole poem, with its setting up of work according to the natural law as a substitute for work according to the human law, is an egregious piece of sham wisdom. The result of work according to the human law, of ethical efficiency in short, is an increasing serenity; and it is not clear that Faust is much calmer at the end of the poem than he is at the beginning. According to Dr. Santayana he is ready to carry into heaven itself his romantic restlessness--his desperate and feverish attempts to escape from ennui.[297] Perhaps this is not the whole truth even in regard to “Faust”; and still less can we follow Dr. Santayana when he seems to discover in the whole work of Goethe only romantic restlessness. At the very time when Goethe was infecting others with the wild expansiveness of the new movement, he himself was beginning to strike out along an entirely different path. He writes in his Journal as early as 1778: “A more definite feeling of limitation and in consequence of true broadening.” Goethe here glimpses the truth that lies at the base of both humanism and religion. He saw that the romantic disease was the imaginative and emotional straining towards the unlimited (_Hang zum Unbegrenzten_), and in opposition to this unrestraint he was never tired of preaching the need of working within boundaries. It may be objected that Goethe is in somewhat the same