This man was one of those by no means rare specimens of persons who are born with perverse sexual instincts, who have more than once been known to exercise a secret influence on the direction of human thought and feeling. He could not feel as a man in relation to a woman, he felt strongest towards her as her offspring, her subject, her slave. He felt impelled to raise her above him and to amalgamate love with filial affection, and this was how the “exalted woman” found her way into literature. Rousseau influenced the younger writers of Germany. The literature of the _ancien régime_, which had helped to form the early youth of Lessing and Goethe, had been frivolous and chivalrous, but not in any way distorted. It was Rousseau who introduced the distorted element, intermingled with his theories about liberty and fresh air, for in this latter respect he was as Swiss as Keller. The younger writers became filled with revolutionary ideas, they went into ecstasies over Rousseau and wrote like him. The impulses which he had inspired continued to bear fruit in the works of popular writers long after the Germany of our century had ceased to read him. The number of ideas will not bear comparison with the number of their promulgators. It is a well-known fact that a very few commonplace ideas are sufficient to nourish the intellect, for ideas in themselves are of no great importance however much they may be pushed to the fore. Impulses are of chief importance. Ideas have only to do with thinking, but impulses distrain body and mind alike, and a given impulse is like an acoustic vibration which ebbs and flows in numberless vibrations, and dies away so gradually that one cannot say for certain when it has stopped. Yet an impulse may be the result of mere chance, and it is so generally. A young, strong, excitable race, in which the strength of generations is collected, stands waiting for an indefinable “something” which shall correspond with its embryo condition. This “something” comes, and the fruitful soil procreates it over and over again, until the land is exhausted by the same seed and reproduces it weaker and weaker. A new literature is always accompanied by a new conception of woman, because woman is the author’s chief point, and in that respect he is like the bird in spring who sings as he goes in search of his little mate. Yet Rousseau’s personal views of woman, united as they were with a national temperament which was full of deep feeling, though without much faculty for observation, was destined to bear fruit for a hundred years in a literature where a thousand figures bear witness to their origin. When the German Empire was founded, German literature became extinct. Germany became the land of manhood _par préférence_, and the worship of woman was treated as a myth at which people sceptically shook their heads. But in the fundamental conception of social democracy the myth descends upon the earth under another form.