To show this in a proximately adequate manner, we should be obliged, as already hinted, to connect the poet’s work, not merely with that of his English predecessors, but with the deeper and more comprehensive movement of the thought of Germany since the time of Kant.  It would be necessary to indicate how, by breaking a way through the narrow creeds and equally narrow scepticism of the previous age, the new spirit extended the horizon of man’s active and contemplative life, and made him free of the universe, and the repository of the past conquests of his race.  It proposed to man the great task of solving the problem of humanity, but it strengthened him with its past achievement, and inspired him with the conviction of its boundless progress.  It is not that the significance of the individual or the meaning of his endeavour is lost.  Under this new view, man has still to fight for his own hand, and it is still recognized that spirit is always burdened with its own fate and cannot share its responsibility.  Morality does not give way to religion or pass into it, and there is a sense in which the individual is always alone in the sphere of duty.

But from this new point of view the individual is re-explained for us, and we begin to understand that he is the focus of a light which is universal, “one more incarnation of the mind of God.”  His moral task is no longer to seek his own in the old sense, but to elevate humanity; for it is only by taking this circuit that he can come to his own.  Such a task as this is a sufficiently great one to occupy all time; but it is to humanity in him that the task belongs, and it will therefore be achieved.  This is no new one-sidedness.  It does not mean, to those who comprehend it, the supplanting of the individual thought by the collective thought, or the substitution of humanity for man.  The universal is in the particular, the fact is the law.  There is no collision between the whole and the part, for the whole lives in the part.  As each individual plant has its own life and beauty and worth, although the universe has conspired to bring it into being; so also, and in a far higher degree, man has his own duty and his own dignity, although he is but the embodiment of forces, natural and spiritual, which have come from the endless past.  Like a letter in a word, or a word in a sentence, he gets his meaning from his context; but the sentence is meaningless without him.  “Rays from all round converge in him,” and he has no power except that which has been lent to him; but all the same, nay, all the more, he must

  “Think as if man never thought before! 
  Act as if all creation hung attent
  On the acting of such faculty as his."[A]

[Footnote A:  Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.]

His responsibility, his individuality, is not less, but greater, in that he can, in his thought and moral action, command the forces that the race has stored for him.  The great man speaks the thought of his people, and his invocations as their priest are just the expression of their dumb yearnings.  And even the mean and insignificant man is what he is, in virtue of the humanity which is blurred and distorted within him; and he can shed his insignificance and meanness, only by becoming a truer vehicle for that humanity.