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But it is no less true that, as respects a higher power and a future state, man, in the language of Goethe's scoffing fiend, "bleibt stets von gleichem Schlag, Und ist so wunderlich als wie am ersten Tag." The history of Catholicism strikingly illustrates these observations.
Science is the consensus of opinion of scientific men, and history has shown that it is slow to accept a truth. Science sneered at Newton for twenty years. Science proved mathematically that an iron ship could not swim, and science declared that a steamship could not cross the Atlantic. Like Goethe's Mephistopheles, our wise professor's forte is "stets verneinen."
John Nepomuk. Owing to centuries of oppression the mind of the people of Bohemia has developed a strong "spirit of negation," "der Geist der stets verneint," as Goethe would say, to the detriment of constructive ability, so it may be that this spirit having failed to reconstruct a church of some sort, at least on national lines, is going under before the mightiest organization the world has ever known, the Church of Rome.
For all your mariolatry, you were full of "der Geist der stets verneint." And so you were able to create a musical Mephisto that will outlive your other work, sonata and all, and express you to other times. For here, all that one senses dimly behind your sugared and pretentious compositions speaks out frankly. Listening to this mighty scherzo, we know the cynicism that corroded your spirit.
You have taste, and an understanding of things! ... Besides that, you will always be able to entertain, and to stir up the most exacting, the most unyielding guests. In English, a "toff"; in American, a "swell." trans. "Die Deutsche Sprache beherrsche ich in geringerem Grade als die franzosische; indes kann ich stets in einer Salon-Plauderei mitmachen."
He must pine away and die, if he be not converted; he cannot always be paying compliments; for caricature has a spice of Goethe's Devil in it, and is "der Geist der stets verneint," the Spirit that is always denying.
Sewell, 'is a virtue; doubt is a sin. Iago is nothing if not critical; and the sceptical spirit der Geist der stets verneint which is satisfied with nothing, which sees in everything good the seed of evil, and the weak spot in every great cause or nature, has been made the special characteristic we all feel with justice of the devil.
The same idea has long been helpful to me in a third form in the following lines of Platen "Was stets und aller Orten Sich ewig jung erweist Ist, in gebundenen Worten Ein ungebundener Geist."
Yet the satanically refined egoism which lays hold of Septimius is the same spirit incarnated in Goethe's Mephistopheles, der Geist der stets verneint. To Faust he denies the existence of good in anything, primarily the good of that universal knowledge to the acquisition of which he has devoted his life, but through this scepticism mining his faith in all besides.
Ein Theil von jener Kraft, Die stets das Böse will, und stets das Gute schafft, . . . . . . . . . . . . . der Geist der stets verneint.
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