When we reflect upon the limited leisure that the mass of even those can enjoy whose lot is cast in the happiest epoch, to abandon themselves to purely intellectual occupations--when we consider how incessant and arduous must ever be the strife of man with nature and the elements to insure the mere means of subsistence, it will soon be perceived that the philosopher of Berlin aimed less at depicting realities than at drawing from the domain of abstraction certain entities which appeared to him beautiful and sublime, and which are so, indeed, and at causing them to act and move in a sphere as ideal as themselves. If any doubts should still remain in this respect, they are soon dispelled when we arrive at the culminating point of the system, consisting of a third and last degree superior to the two others. This greatest point of perfection is that upon which stands the _finished_ man (_der Gebildete_); that is to say, the man who, in his nature, possesses "something higher and more inward or essential; a clear and comprehensive faculty of seeing all things in their true light; a recognition and appreciation of the ultimate goal of man's moral and intellectual aspirations, which diffuses itself harmoniously over all his feelings and his character."[98] We here have a regular gradation from man in a civilized or "humanized" state, to the man of cultivation--the philosopher, the poet, the artist; and thence still higher to the _finished_, the _perfect_ man, who has attained the greatest elevation possible to our species; a man who, if I seize rightly Mr. Humboldt's idea, had his living counterpart in Goethe, as that towering mind is described to us in its olympic serenity. This theory rests upon no other basis than Mr. Von Humboldt's perception of the immense difference between the civilization of a nation and the comparative height of perfection attained by great, isolated individualities. This difference is so great that civilizations different from ours, and perhaps inferior to it, have produced men in some respects superior to those we admire most.