★ 137 ★
and contagious disease. They have stopped at the symptoms, throwing them together and interpreting them in various ways. Some thought it was just a local illness. The most ingenious opponents urged castration. They clearly noted that this illness was nothing but a crisis in the onset of puberty.
106. Would it not be wonderful to be the contemporary of a truly great man! The current majority of cultivated Germans do not share this opinion. They think is it sufficient to deny all greatness and follow the planned system. If the Copernican system was not so firmly established, it would be very comfortable for them to turn the sun and stars into will-o-wisps and to make the earth the entire universe. That is why Goethe, who is now the true governor of the poetic spirit on earth, is treated as meanly as possible and viewed disdainfully when he does not satisfy their expectations for typical amusement and momentarily confounds them. An interesting symptom of this direct weakness of the soul is the reception that Herrmann and Dorothea has generally received.
107. Geognostics believe that the physical center of gravity lies underneath Fez and Morocco. Goethe, an anthrognostic, conjectures in Meister that the intellectual center of gravity lies beneath the German Nation.
108. Up to now it has been impossible to describe people because one did not know what a person was. Once one knows what a person is, one will also be able to describe individuals genetically.
