Addresses to the German Nation

INTRODUCTION AND GENERAL SURVEY

I. The addresses which I now commence I have announced as a continuation of the lectures which I gave three winters ago in this place, and which were published under the title: “Characteristics of the Present Age.” In those lectures I showed that our own age was set in the third great epoch of time, an epoch which had as the motive of all its vital activities and impulses mere material self-seeking; that this age could comprehend and understand itself completely only by recognising that as the sole possible motive; and, finally, that by this clear perception of its own nature it was becoming deeply rooted and immovably fixed in this its natural state of existence.

Time is taking giant strides with us more than with any other age since the history of the world began. At some point within the three years that have gone by since my interpretation of the present age that epoch has come to an end. At some point self-seeking has destroyed itself, because by its own complete development it has lost its self and the independence of that self; and since it would not voluntarily set itself any other aim but self, an external power has forced upon it another and a foreign purpose. He who has once undertaken to interpret his own age must make his interpretation keep pace with the progress of that age, if progress there be. It is, therefore, my duty to acknowledge as past what has ceased to be the present, before the same audience to whom I characterized it as the present.