GERMAN SCIENCE 121 
I do not know. Certainly it is felt by some people. I gave 
you at the outset of this address some quotation from the 
writings of Liebig when in 1840 he lamented the national 
disregard of science. To this it is only fair to set in contrast 
some modern utterances made sixty years later by men not 
less devoted to the interest of their country :* 
‘Two souls dwell in the German nation’, writes Professor 
Paulsen ; ‘the German nation has been called the nation of 
poets and thinkers, and it may be proud ofthe name. To-day 
it may again be called the nation of masterful combatants, as 
which it originally appeared in history.’* That is true, but 
an addition is needful, for the struggle to which Germany has 
since 1860 devoted its undivided strength is not a struggle 
waged consciously in the name and for the sake of civilization, 
is not a struggle for intellectual or political ideas, or ideals of 
any kind, but a struggle for sheer mastery ‘in the realm of 
matter and for political ascendancy amongst the nations. Yet 
if Germany should ultimately gain all the material success 
and political power it aspires after, no one will dare to say 
that it will mean more for civilization and the world than the 
weak and disjointed Germany of a century ago, which gave to 
mankind the Goethe and Schiller, the Kant and Fichte whose 
teachings have for the time been cast aside. 
‘One recognizes with anxious apprehension’, says another 
writer,’ ‘that the active interest for natural science and 
technical improvements is not balanced by a deeper concern for 
the problems of the mental sciences and the arts, which, in 
truth, can alone beneficially appropriate the achievements of 
technical culture; that in every department of German life 
a tendency to be satisfied with externals is visible, and the 
+ I make these quotations from the well-known work ‘The Evolution 
of Modern Germany’, by Mr. W. H. Dawson (Fisher Unwin, 1908). 
* Zur Ethik und Politik, p. 59. 
8 Unser Kaiser und sein Volk, by a ‘Schwarzseher’ (‘ Pessimist’), 
p. 155. 
