Goethe was then in his
thirty-second year, and Schiller ten years younger.
* * * * *
Of Lessing's relation to metaphysics the reader will find ample
discussion in Herr Stahr's volumes. We are not particularly concerned
with them, because his interest in such questions was purely speculative,
and because he was more concerned to exercise the powers of his mind than
to analyze them. His chief business, his master impulse always, was to be
a man of letters in the narrower sense of the term. Even into theology he
only made occasional raids across the border, as it were, and that not so
much with a purpose of reform as in defence of principles which applied
equally to the whole domain of thought. He had even less sympathy with
heterodoxy than with orthodoxy, and, so far from joining a party or
wishing to form one, would have left belief a matter of choice to the
individual conscience. "From the bottom of my heart I hate all those
people who wish to found sects. For it is not error, but sectarian error,
yes, even sectarian truth, that makes men unhappy, or would do so if
truth would found a sect."[156] Again he says, that in his theological
controversies he is "much less concerned about theology than about sound
common-sense, and only therefore prefer the old orthodox (at bottom
_tolerant_) theology to the new (at bottom _intolerant_), because the
former openly conflicts with sound common-sense, while the latter would
fain corrupt it.
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