especially for a synthesis between feeling and thinking). All the misfortune which had been suffered, the tragic incomprehensibilities of the historic process to which one is subject, the awareness of their own shortcomings—all this was put into the corner-stone of the new belief. They tried to grasp the conception of fate as fully as possible. Incited and consolidated by the urge to arrive at new combinations of all things and to see something like order and sense in a dual—political and spiritual—catastrophe, they devoted themselves to two streams of thought and feeling. One is more Christian or mystic: the fusion of all things in a recognition of God which soars, so to speak, above and beyond the rational. The other is more ancient, or rather, oriental and pagan; starting from a magnificent comprehension of the material life, it arrives at the conception of life's flow, and likewise moves in a dark bed beneath the rational. But it is not as though each of these tendencies had precluded the other. Rather, they merged together, just as two tendencies had done almost two thousand years before, when a paganism striving after spirituality and a Judaic Christianity inclining towards a pagan outlook had really gone over into each other—and with tremendous results. This neither purely spiritual nor purely vitalistic attitude—which can no longer be reached by the categories of optimism or pessimism prevailing in the nineteenth century, because it operates, figuratively, on an entirely new plane—holds in thrall the minds of men who can be considered as forming one generation, and who will determine by their pressure all intellectual developments. It would be idle and trivial to desire to ascertain the numerical ratio between these individuals and the totality of available young men; yet I believe that there is a great body of these people who are filled with a religiosity which is not dogmatized, but living and pulsating, that they have swept through all classes of the nation, and are banding together in small conventicles everywhere throughout the German-speaking countries. This might be called a condition of pre-messianic religiosity. And it has even conjured up for itself a leader, or forerunner of the leader: not in the form of a human being of flesh and blood, but in the form of a dead man, a single deceased individual who had been forgotten by the nation for nearly a hundred years, but whose spiritual presence and power seems so great and unusual to the present generation rallying about him that we should rather speak of it as a religious phenomenon than a purely literary one. This man who was reborn,
