MENTAL ASPECTS OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY: GERMANY; ENGLAND; CONCLUSION I. German Appropriation of Christianity and Antique Culture. II. Othloh’s Spiritual Conflict. III. England; Closing Comparisons. I In the Germans of the eleventh century one notes a strong sense of German selfhood, supplemented by a consciousness that Latin culture is a foreign matter, introduced as a thing of great value which it were exceeding well for them to make their own. They are even conscious of having been converted to Latin Christianity, which on their part they are imbuing with German thoughts and feeling. They are not Romance people; they have never spoken Latin; it has never been and will never be their speech. They will master what they can of the antique education which has been brought to them. But even as it was no part of their forefathers’ lives, so it will never penetrate their own personalities, so as to make them the spiritual descendants of any antique Latin or Latinized people. They have never been and never will be Latinized; but will remain forever Germans. Consequently the appropriation of the Latin culture in Germany is a labour of translation: first a palpable labour of translation from the Latin language into the German tongue, and secondly, and for always, a more subtle kind of translation of the antique influence into a German understanding of the same, and gradually into informing principles made use of by a strong and advancing racial genius. The German genius will be enlarged and developed through these foreign elements, but it will never cease to use the Latin culture as a means of informing and developing itself. No need to say that these strong statements apply to the Germans in their home north of the Alps and east of the Rhine; not to those who left the Fatherland, and in the course of generations became Italians, for example. Moreover, general phrases must always be taken subject to qualification and rounding of the corners. No people can absorb a foreign influence without in some degree being made over into the likeness of what they are receiving, and to that extent ceasing to be their unmitigated selves. In general, however, while Latin Christianity and the antique culture both were brought to Germany from abroad, the Germans were converted or transformed only by the former, and merely took and used the latter--a true statement this, so far as one may separate these two great mingled factors of mediaeval progress.