If, in considering these details, we have taken into account the fact that many good things were said and investigated, and that many things have since then been more fairly judged than on any previous occasion, there yet remains to be said of the whole that it was a general danger, and one by no means small, to set knowledge altogether below feeling under the appearance of an entire and definitive acquaintance with the past—and, to use that expression of Kant, who thus defined his own particular task—“To make way again for belief by fixing the limits of knowledge.” Let us once more breathe freely, the hour of this danger is past! And yet, strange to say, the very spirits which these Germans conjured up with such eloquence have at length become the most dangerous for the intentions of those who did conjure them up: history, the comprehension of origin and development, sympathy with the past, the new passion for feeling and knowledge, after they had been for a long time at the service of this obscure exalted and retrograde spirit, have once more assumed another nature, and are now soaring with outstretched wings above the heads of those who once upon a time conjured them forth, as new and stronger genii of that very enlightenment to combat which they had been resuscitated. It is this enlightenment which we have now to carry forward,—caring nothing for the fact that there has been and still is “a great revolution,” and again a great “reaction” against it: these are but playful crests of foam when compared with the truly great current on which we float, and want to float. 198. ASSIGNING PRESTIGE TO ONE’S COUNTRY.—It is the men of culture who determine the rank of their country, and they are characterised by an innumerable number of great inward experiences, which they have digested and can now value justly. In France and Italy this fell to the lot of the nobility; in Germany, where up to now the nobility has been, as a rule, composed of men who had not much intellect to boast about (perhaps this will soon cease to be the case), it was the task of the priests, the school teachers and their descendants. 199.