The doctrine, in its essence, was dear to Goethe, as well as to Schiller, and takes us into the holy-of-holies of their joint philosophy. What else did Goethe mean by his oft-reiterated preachment of renunciation, and by his well-known verses about 'weaning oneself from the half and living resolutely in the whole, the good and the beautiful'? In his excellent book upon Diderot Mr. John Morley speaks somewhere of "that affectation of culture with which the great Goethe infected part of the world". Let it not be forgotten, however, in our latter-day contempt of culture, that the Weimar poets were great workers, and also, in their way, great fighters. They did not turn their attention--at least not directly--to the crushing of the Infamous, nor to any battle against social or political wrong. They fought rather for sanity, for good art, for philosophy; for those things which go to enrich and broaden the life of the individual. It was a good fight,--the best which, at their time, with their gifts, they could possibly have engaged in. Schiller's fervid verses, recommending an escape from the bondage of sense to the free realm of the mind, correspond of course to nothing that is humanly feasible. The shackles of the flesh are upon us and there is no way to get rid of them. It is only an ideal, a poet's dream. Nevertheless the subject has a practical aspect which is definable in plain prose. It is found in the following passage from Goethe: We put one passion in place of another; employments, dilettantisms, amusements, hobbies,--we try them all through to the end only to cry out at last that all is vanity. No one is horrified at this false, this blasphemous saying; indeed it is thought to be wise and irrefutable. But there are a few persons who, anticipating such intolerable feelings, in order to avoid all partial resignations, resign themselves universally once for all. Such persons convince themselves with regard to the eternal, necessary, law-governed order of things, and seek to acquire ideas which are indestructible and are only confirmed by the contemplation of that which is transient.[107] Other poems of the year 1795 were 'The Partition of the Earth', wherein Zeus takes pity on the portionless poet by giving him a perpetual _entrée_ to the celestial court; the mildly humorous 'Deeds of the Philosopher', a bit of persiflage on the art of proving what everybody knows, and also several pieces in the elegiac form.