whole lot to be divided is such a beggarly matter, truly a ‘feast of shells,’ for the substance has been spilled out:  not enough to quench one Appetite; and the collective human species clutching at them!—­Can we not, in all such cases, rather say:  ’Take it, thou too-ravenous individual; take that pitiful additional fraction of a share, which I reckoned mine, but which thou so wantest; take it with a blessing:  would to Heaven I had enough for thee!’—­If Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre be, ‘to a certain extent, Applied Christianity,’ surely to a still greater extent, so is this.  We have here not a Whole Duty of Man, yet a Half Duty, namely the Passive half:  could we but do it, as we can demonstrate it!

“But indeed Conviction, were it never so excellent, is worthless till it convert itself into Conduct.  Nay properly Conviction is not possible till then; inasmuch as all Speculation is by nature endless, formless, a vortex amid vortices, only by a felt indubitable certainty of Experience does it find any centre to revolve round, and so fashion itself into a system.  Most true is it, as a wise man teaches us, that ’Doubt of any sort cannot be removed except by Action.’  On which ground, too, let him who gropes painfully in darkness or uncertain light, and prays vehemently that the dawn may ripen into day, lay this other precept well to heart, which to me was of invaluable service:  ‘Do the Duty which lies nearest thee,’ which thou knowest to be a Duty!  Thy second Duty will already have become clearer.

“May we not say, however, that the hour of Spiritual Enfranchisement is even this:  When your Ideal World, wherein the whole man has been dimly struggling and inexpressibly languishing to work, becomes revealed, and thrown open; and you discover, with amazement enough, like the Lothario in Wilhelm Meister, that your ‘America is here or nowhere’?  The Situation that has not its Duty, its Ideal, was never yet occupied by man.  Yes here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal:  work it out therefrom; and working, believe, live, be free.  Fool! the Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself:  thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of:  what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the Form thou give it be heroic, be poetic?  O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth:  the thing thou seekest is already with thee, ‘here or nowhere,’ couldst thou only see!

“But it is with man’s Soul as it was with Nature:  the beginning of Creation is—­Light.  Till the eye have vision, the whole members are in bonds.  Divine moment, when over the tempest-tost Soul, as once over the wild-weltering Chaos, it is spoken:  Let there be Light!  Ever to the greatest that has felt such moment, is it not miraculous and God-announcing; even as, under simpler figures, to the simplest and least.  The mad primeval Discord is hushed; the rudely jumbled conflicting elements bind themselves into separate Firmaments:  deep silent rock-foundations are built beneath; and the skyey vault with its everlasting Luminaries above:  instead of a dark wasteful Chaos, we have a blooming, fertile, heaven-encompassed World.