himself in his place?  He saw his son lapsed to atheism, to the esprit, to the pleasant frivolity of clever Frenchmen—­he saw in the background the great bloodsucker, the spider skepticism; he suspected the incurable wretchedness of a heart no longer hard enough either for evil or good, and of a broken will that no longer commands, is no longer able to command.  Meanwhile, however, there grew up in his son that new kind of harder and more dangerous skepticism—­who knows to what extent it was encouraged just by his father’s hatred and the icy melancholy of a will condemned to solitude?—­the skepticism of daring manliness, which is closely related to the genius for war and conquest, and made its first entrance into Germany in the person of the great Frederick.  This skepticism despises and nevertheless grasps; it undermines and takes possession; it does not believe, but it does not thereby lose itself; it gives the spirit a dangerous liberty, but it keeps strict guard over the heart.  It is the German form of skepticism, which, as a continued Fredericianism, risen to the highest spirituality, has kept Europe for a considerable time under the dominion of the German spirit and its critical and historical distrust Owing to the insuperably strong and tough masculine character of the great German philologists and historical critics (who, rightly estimated, were also all of them artists of destruction and dissolution), a new conception of the German spirit gradually established itself—­in spite of all Romanticism in music and philosophy—­in which the leaning towards masculine skepticism was decidedly prominent whether, for instance, as fearlessness of gaze, as courage and sternness of the dissecting hand, or as resolute will to dangerous voyages of discovery, to spiritualized North Pole expeditions under barren and dangerous skies.  There may be good grounds for it when warm-blooded and superficial humanitarians cross themselves before this spirit, CET esprit FATALISTE, IRONIQUE, MEPHISTOPHELIQUE, as Michelet calls it, not without a shudder.  But if one would realize how characteristic is this fear of the “man” in the German spirit which awakened Europe out of its “dogmatic slumber,” let us call to mind the former conception which had to be overcome by this new one—­and that it is not so very long ago that a masculinized woman could dare, with unbridled presumption, to recommend the Germans to the interest of Europe as gentle, good-hearted, weak-willed, and poetical fools.  Finally, let us only understand profoundly enough Napoleon’s astonishment when he saw Goethe it reveals what had been regarded for centuries as the “German spirit” “Voila un Homme!”—­that was as much as to say “But this is a man!  And I only expected to see a German!”