mythical foundation consider that, if he examines closely, he will also discover such a basis in man himself, and that, too, in the mere man, in the representative of the species, and not only in the more specific branch of the same, in the individual.  Or may man’s fundamental qualities, either physical or mental, be accounted for, that is to say, can they be deduced from any other organic canon than the one which has been posited once for all with man himself, and which cannot be traced farther back to a final primitive cause of things, or be critically resolved into its components?  Are they not in part, as for example most of the passions, opposed to reason and conscience, therefore to the very faculties of man which, being quite general and disinterested, may most safely be designated as those which connect him immediately with the universe, and has this contradiction ever been explained away?  Why, then, in art negate an act upon which is founded even our view of nature?

Otto Prechtler related to me the following incident.  When Grillparzer made my acquaintance upon my arrival in Vienna he said to Prechtler:  “No one on earth will be able to influence this man.  One person might have done so, but he is dead; I mean Goethe.”  A few years later he added, “I was mistaken, not even Goethe would have been able to influence him.”

(1863)

I do not know the world, for although I myself represent a piece of it, this is such a minutely small part that no conclusion as to the true nature of the world can be deduced therefrom.  Man, however, I know, for I am myself a man, and even though I do not know how he originates in the world, yet I know very well how, having once originated, he reacts upon it.  I therefore conscientiously respect the laws of the human soul; in reference to everything else, however, I believe that imagination draws inspiration from the same depths out of which the world itself arose, that is to say, the multifarious series of phenomena which exists at present, but which at some future time, may perhaps be replaced by another.

(To Siegmund Englaender.)

—­You wish to believe in the poet as you believe in the Deity; why ascend so high into the region of clouds, where everything ceases to be, even analogy?  Would you not probably attain more if you descended to the beast and ascribed to the artistic faculty an intermediate stage between the instinct of the beast and the consciousness of man?  There at least we are in the sphere of experience, and have the prospect of ascertaining something real by applying two known quantities to an unknown one.  The beast leads a dream life which nature herself immediately regulates and strictly adapts to those purposes, by the attainment of which, on the one hand, the creature itself subsists, but, on the other, the world continues.  The artist leads a similar dream life, naturally only as an artist, and probably from the same cause; for the cosmic laws hardly come any more clearly into his