This, then, is the task at which Goethe toiled for many an earnest year. He will read through world to man, and through all man's fortunes, inward and outward, to the complete constitution and perfect architectures of his spirit. Let him succeed in that, and the word of words for our century and for many centuries is spoken. "Positive philosophy," with complacent sciolism, may still coldly asseverate that the world is a dead congeries of "laws," into whose realm man is cast to take pot-luck in the universe; but we shall know better. The worldling may still find all good and all evil in the mere fortunes of man; we shall see beyond these. The fatalist may persist in regarding limits and conditions as the all in all of life; we shall see them as a foothold for growth. Once that the spirit of man appears as the final recipient and vessel of uses, the orderly emptiness of world-law is filled with a meaning, while the wild welter of man's fortunes and the rigid fixity of his conditions find alike sufficing centre around which their orbit is drawn. Observe, however, that we have here no piece of system-making. Goethe does not attempt a final scientific theory of existence. He _pictures_ life from this point of view. If you can feel the verity in this picture, you may then feel the same verity in that picture which Another has painted, namely, in life itself. Observe, once more, that even here life is depicted only from _one_ of its two poles, and that, perhaps, the lesser. The theme is Growth, and this growth is considered as proceeding from definite elements contained in man's being, and proceeding to definite results still contained in his being. "Faust" assumes the opposite pole. Its theme is Destiny. It regards man's life as sweeping down upon him from heights above his thought, and proceeding to ends beyond his imagination. His existence appears as fashioned in essence and end by predestinating power, and the Eternal "takes the responsibility." The artist must choose his point of view. It is impossible to paint the house at once from the inside and from the outside. "Faust" is properly an epic poem; "Wilhelm Meister" is a prose epic,--and prose, not from lack of metre, but precisely from its point of view. It treats life, not as proceeding from the bosom and moving to the ends of benign Destiny, but as contained in thought, will, character, aspiration, love, and as contingent, rather than eternally predestined, in its result. Much of religious grandeur, therefore,--to the great disgust of Novalis,--it loses; much of economic value it gains. A prose picture: yet even here we read through all else to man, and through all else in man himself to the upbuilding of his spirit. As Goethe reads life, let us see if we can read his book.