German civilization has developed in antagonism with the Greco-Roman civilization.  To adopt the former was on the part of God to reject the latter.  Therefore German consciousness, realized without hindrance in all its force, is but the Divine consciousness. Deutschtum = God and God = Deutschtum.  In practice it is enough that an idea is authentically German in order that we may and must conclude that it is true, that it is just, and that it ought to prevail.

What are the essential dogmas of this truth, which is German because it is true and which is true because it is German?  German metaphysicians explain that to us more clearly than is usual by thought.  The first quality of this truth is that it is in opposition to what classic or Greco-Latin thought would recognize as true.  The latter has sought to discover what in man is essentially human, to render man superior to other beings, and to substitute more and more the superior elements for the inferior elements in human life—­reason for blind impulse, justice for force, good for wickedness.  It has undertaken to create in the world a moral force capable of controlling and humanizing material forces.  To this doctrine, which rests upon man as its centre and which was essentially human, German thought opposes itself as the infinite opposes the finite, the absolute the relative, the whole the part.  The disciples of the Greeks had at their disposition no light except that of human reason; the German genius possesses a transcendent reason which pierces the mysteries of the absolute, of the Divine.  What would light be without the shadow from which it is detached?  How could the ego exist if there was not somewhere a non ego to which it is opposed?  Evil is not less indispensable than good in the transcendent symphony of the whole.

There is something more.  It may be a satisfaction for a Greco-Latin, impelled by his mediocre logic to say that good is good, evil is evil, but these simple formulas are contrary to the truth per se.  Good by itself is absolutely impotent to realize itself.  It is only an idea, an abstraction.  The power and faculty of creation belong to evil alone.  So that if good is to be realized it can only be by means of evil, and by means of evil left entirely to itself.  God could not exist if He were not created by the devil, and thus, in a sense, evil is good and good is bad.  Evil is good because it creates.  Good is bad because it is impotent.  The supreme and true divine law is just this:  That evil left to itself, evil as evil, gives birth to good, which, by itself, would never be able to advance from the ideal to the real.  “I am,” said Mephistopheles, “part of that force which always wishes evil and always creates the good.”  Such is the divine order.  He who undertakes to do good by good will only do evil.  It is only in unchaining the power of evil that one has a chance to realize any good.

From these metaphysical principles questions raised by the idea of civilization receive most remarkable solutions.