_Goethe's Doctrine of Immortality._--"Kant has unquestionably done the best service, by drawing the limits beyond which human intellect is not able to penetrate, and leaving at rest the insoluble problems. What a deal have people philosophised about immortality! and how far have they got? I doubt not of our immortality, for nature cannot dispense with the _entelecheia_. But we are not all, in like manner, immortal; and he who would manifest himself in future as a great _entelecheia_ must be one now.... To me the eternal existence of my soul is proved from my idea of activity. If I work on incessantly till my death, nature is bound to give me another form of existence when the present one can no longer sustain my spirit."--_Ibid._ vol. ii. pp. 193, 194, and p. 122. _Goethe's Image of Life._--"Child, child, no more! The coursers of Time, lashed, as it were, by invisible spirits, hurry on the light car of our destiny; and all that we can do is, in cool self-possession, to hold the reins with a firm hand, and to guide the wheels, now to the left, now to the right, avoiding a stone here, or a precipice there. Whither it is hurrying, who can tell? and who, indeed, can remember the point from which it started?"--_Egmont._ _Man's proper business._--"It has at all times been said and repeated that man should strive to know himself. This is a singular requisition; with which no one complies, or indeed ever will comply. Man is by all his senses and efforts directed to externals--to the world around him; and he has to know this so far, and to make it so far serviceable, as he requires for his own ends. It is only when he feels joy or sorrow that he knows anything about himself, and only by joy or sorrow is he instructed what to seek and what to shun."--_Eckermann's Conversations of Goethe_, vol. ii. p. 180.