_The old Problem: "What is German?"_--Let us count up apart the real acquisitions of philosophical thought for which we have to thank German intellects: are they in any allowable sense to be counted also to the credit of the whole race? Can we say that they are at the same time the work of the "German soul," or at least a symptom of it, in the sense in which we are accustomed to think, for example, of Plato's ideomania, his almost religious madness for form, as an event and an evidence of the "Greek soul"? Or would the reverse perhaps be true? Were they individually as much _exceptions_ to the spirit of the race, as was, for example, Goethe's Paganism with a good conscience? Or as Bismarck's Macchiavelism was with a good conscience, his so-called "practical politics" in Germany? Did our philosophers perhaps even go counter to the _need_ of the "German soul"? In short, were the German philosophers really philosophical _Germans_?--I call to mind three cases. Firstly, _Leibnitz's_ incomparable insight--with which he obtained the advantage not only over Descartes, but over all who had philosophised up to his time,--that consciousness is only an accident of mental representation, and _not_ its necessary and essential attribute; that consequently what we call consciousness only constitutes a state of our spiritual and psychical world (perhaps a morbid state), and is _far from being that world itself_:--is there anything German in this thought, the profundity of which has not as yet been exhausted? Is there reason to think that a person of the Latin race would not readily have stumbled on this reversal of the apparent?--for it is a reversal. Let us call to mind secondly, the immense note of interrogation which _Kant_ wrote after the notion of causality. Not that he at all doubted its legitimacy, like Hume: on the contrary, he began cautiously to define the domain within which this notion has significance generally (we have not even yet got finished with the marking out of these limits). Let us take thirdly, the astonishing hit of _Hegel,_ who stuck at no logical usage or fastidiousness when he ventured to teach that the conceptions of kinds develop _out of one another:_ with which theory the thinkers in Europe were prepared for the last great scientific movement, for Darwinism--for without Hegel there would have been no Darwin. Is there anything German in this Hegelian innovation which first introduced the decisive conception of evolution into science?--Yes, without doubt we feel that there is something of ourselves "discovered" and divined in all three cases; we are thankful for it, and at the same time surprised; each of these three principles is a thoughtful piece of German self-confession, self-understanding, and self-knowledge. We feel with Leibnitz that "our inner world is far richer, ampler, and more concealed"; as Germans we are doubtful, like Kant, about the ultimate validity of scientific knowledge of nature, and in general about whatever _can_ be known _causaliter:_ the _knowable_ as such now appears to us of _less_ worth. We Germans should still have been Hegelians, even though there had never been a Hegel, inasmuch as we (in contradistinction to all Latin peoples) instinctively attribute to becoming, to evolution, a profounder significance and higher value than to that which "is"--we hardly believe at all in the validity of the concept "being." This is all the more the case because we are not inclined to concede to our human logic that it is logic in itself, that it is the only kind of logic (we should rather like, on the contrary, to convince ourselves that it is only a special case, and perhaps one of the strangest and most stupid).--A fourth question would be whether also _Schopenhauer_ with his Pessimism, that is to say, the problem of _the worth of existence,_ had to be a German. I think not. The event _after_ which this problem was to be expected with certainty, so that an astronomer of the soul could have calculated the day and the hour for it--namely, the decay of the belief in the Christian God, the victory of scientific atheism,--is a universal European event, in which all races are to have their share of service and honour. On the contrary, it has to be ascribed precisely to the Germans--those with whom Schopenhauer was contemporary,--that they delayed this victory of atheism longest, and endangered it most. Hegel especially was its retarder _par excellence,_ in virtue of the grandiose attempt which he made to persuade us at the very last of the divinity of existence, with the help of our sixth sense, "the historical sense." As philosopher, Schopenhauer was the _first_ avowed and inflexible atheist we Germans have had: his hostility to Hegel had here its motive.