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skepticism, which, as a continued Fredericianism, risen to the highest spirituality, has kept Europe for a considerable time under the dominion of the German spirit and its critical and historical distrust. Owing to the insuperably strong and tough masculine character of the great German philologists and historical critics (who, rightly estimated, were also all of them artists of destruction and dissolution), a new conception of the German spirit gradually established itself⁠—in spite of all Romanticism in music and philosophy⁠—in which the leaning towards masculine skepticism was decidedly prominent whether, for instance, as fearlessness of gaze, as courage and sternness of the dissecting hand, or as resolute will to dangerous voyages of discovery, to spiritualized North Pole expeditions under barren and dangerous skies. There may be good grounds for it when warmblooded and superficial humanitarians cross themselves before this spirit, cet esprit fataliste, ironique, méphistophélique , as Michelet calls it, not without a shudder. But if one would realize how characteristic is this fear of the “man” in the German spirit which awakened Europe out of its “dogmatic slumber,” let us call to mind the former conception which had to be overcome by this new one⁠—and that it is not so very long ago that a masculinized woman could dare, with unbridled presumption, to recommend the Germans to the interest of Europe as gentle, good-hearted, weak-willed, and poetical fools. Finally, let us only understand profoundly enough Napoleon’s astonishment when he saw Goethe: it reveals what had been regarded for centuries as the “German spirit” “ voilà un homme! ”⁠—that was as much as to say “But this is a man ! And I only expected to see a German!”