But if Immanuel Kant, that arch-destroyer in the realms of thought, far surpassed Maximilian Robespierre in terrorism, yet he had certain points of resemblance to the latter that invite a comparison of the two men. In both we find the same inflexible, rigid, prosaic integrity. Then we find in both the same instinct of distrust,--only that the one exercises it against ideas, and names it a critique, while the other applies it to men, and calls it republican virtue. In both, however, the narrow-minded shopkeeper type is markedly manifest. Nature had intended them to weigh out sugar and coffee, but fate willed it otherwise, and into the scales of one it laid a king, into those of the other, a God. And they both weighed correctly. ...Pantheism had already in Fichte's time interpenetrated German art; even the Catholic Romanticists unconsciously followed this current, and Goethe expressed it most unmistakably. This he already does in _Werther_. In _Faust_ he seeks to establish an affinity between man and nature by a bold, direct, mystic method, and conjures the secret forces of nature through the magic formula of the powers of hell. But this Goethean pantheism is most clearly and most charmingly disclosed in his short ballads. The early philosophy of Spinoza has shed its mathematical shell, and now flutters about us as Goethean poetry. Hence the wrath of our pietists, and of orthodoxy in general, against the Goethean ballads. With their pious bear-paws they clumsily strike at this butterfly, which is so daintily ethereal, so light of wing, that it always flits out of reach. These Goethean ballads have a tantalising charm that is indescribable. The harmonious verses captivate the heart like the tenderness of a loving maiden; the words embrace you while the thought kisses you. ...This giant was minister in a lilliputian German state, in which he could never move at ease. It was said of Phidias's Jupiter seated in Olympus, that were he ever to stand erect the sudden uprising would rend asunder the vaulted roof. This was exactly Goethe's situation at Weimar; had he suddenly lifted himself up from his peaceful, sitting posture, he would have shattered the gabled canopy of state, or, more probably, he would have bruised his own head. But the German Jupiter remained quietly seated, and composedly accepted homage and incense. ...When it was seen that such saddening follies were budding out of philosophy and ripening into a baleful maturity--when it was observed that the German youth were generally absorbed in metaphysical abstractions, thereby neglecting the most important questions of the time and unfitting themselves for practical life,--it was quite natural that patriots and lovers of liberty should be led to conceive a justifiable dislike to philosophy; and a few went so far as to condemn it utterly and entirely, as idle, useless, chimerical theorising.