German philosophy, as a whole,--Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, to mention the greatest,--is the most out-and-out _form of romanticism_ and home-sickness that has ever yet existed: it is a yearning for the best that has ever been known on earth. One is at home nowhere; that which is ultimately yearned after is a place where one can somehow feel at home; because one has been at home there before, and that place is the _Greek_ world! But it is precisely in that direction that airbridges are broken down_--save,_ of course, the rainbow of concepts! And the latter lead everywhere, to all the homes and "fatherlands" that ever existed for Greek souls! Certainly, one must be very light and thin in order to cross these bridges! But what happiness lies even in this desire for spirituality, almost for ghostliness! With it, how far one is from the "press and bustle" and the mechanical boorishness of the natural sciences, how far from the vulgar din of "modern ideas"! One wants to get back to the Greeks _via_ the Fathers of the Church, from North to South, from formulæ to forms; the passage out of antiquity--Christianity--is still a source of joy as a means of access to antiquity, as a portion of the old world itself, as a glistening mosaic of ancient concepts and ancient valuations. Arabesques, scroll-work, rococo of scholastic abstractions--always better, that is to say, finer and more slender, than the peasant and plebeian reality of Northern Europe, and still a protest on the part of higher intellectuality against the peasant war and insurrection of the mob which have become master of the intellectual taste of Northern Europe, and which had its leader in a man as great and unintellectual as Luther:--in this respect German philosophy belongs to the Counter-Reformation, it might even be looked upon as related to the Renaissance, or at least to the will to Renaissance, the will to get ahead with the discovery of antiquity, with the excavation of ancient philosophy, and above all of pre-Socratic philosophy--the most thoroughly dilapidated of all Greek temples! Possibly, in à few hundred years, people will be of the opinion that all German philosophy derived its dignity from this fact, that step by step it attempted to reclaim the soil of antiquity, and that therefore all demands for "originality" must appear both petty and foolish when compared with Germany's higher claim to having refastened the bonds which seemed for ever rent--the bonds which bound us to the Greeks, the highest type of "men" ever evolved hitherto. To-day we are once more approaching all the fundamental principles of the cosmogony which the Greek mind in Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Democritus, and Anaxagoras, was responsible for. Day by day we are growing more _Greek_; at first, as is only natural, the change remains confined to concepts and valuations, and we hover around like Greasing spirits: but