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The extent to which the new warlike age into which we Europeans have evidently entered may perhaps also be favourable to the development of another and stronger variety of scepticism - on that point I'd like to state my views only provisionally through a comparison which friends of German history will understand easily enough. That unthinking enthusiast for good-looking, excessively tall grenadiers, who as King of Prussia, brought into being a military and sceptical genius - and in the process basically created that new type of German who has just recently emerged victorious - the questionable and mad father of Frederick the Great - in one respect himself had the grip and lucky claw of genius.⁸ He knew what Germany then needed, a lack which was a hundred times more worrisome and more urgent than some deficiency in culture and social style. His aversion to the young Frederick emerged from the anxiety of a profound instinct. What was missing was men. And he suspected to his most bitter annoyance that his own son might not be man enough. On that point he was deceived, but who in his place would not have been deceived? He saw his son decline into atheism, esprit, the luxurious frivolousness of witty Frenchmen: - he saw in the background the great blood sucker, the spider of scepticism. He suspected the incurable misery of a heart that is no longer hard enough for evil and for good, of a fractured will, which no longer commands, no longer can command. But in the meantime there grew up in his son that more dangerous and harder new form of scepticism - who knows how much it was encouraged by that very hate of his father's and by the icy melancholy of a will pushed into solitude? - the scepticism of the daring masculinity, which is closely related to the genius for war and conquest and which, in the shape of Frederick the Great, first gained entry into Germany. This scepticism despises and nonetheless grabs hold. It undermines and takes possession. It does not believe, but in so doing does not lose itself. It gives the spirit a dangerous freedom, but it is hard on the heart. It is the German form of scepticism, which, as a constant Frederickanism intensified into the highest spirituality, has brought Europe for some time under the dominion of the German spirit and its critical and historical mistrust. Thanks to the invincibly strong and tenacious masculine character of the great German philologists and critical historians (who, if we see them properly, were collectively also artists of destruction and subversion), gradually a new idea of the German spirit established itself, in spite of all the Romanticism in music and philosophy, an idea in which the characteristic of manly scepticism stepped decisively forward: it could be, for example, a fearlessness in the gaze, courage and hardness in the destroying hand, a tough will for dangerous voyages of discovery, for expeditions to the spiritual North Pole under arid and dangerous skies. There may well be good reasons why warm-blooded and superficial humanitarian people cross themselves when confronted with this particular spirit: Michelet, not without a shudder, called it cet esprit fataliste, ironique, méphistophélique [this fatal and ironic Mephistophelean spirit].⁹ But if we want to feel how distinctive this fear of the "man" in the German spirit is, through which Europe was roused out of its "dogmatic slumber," we might remember the earlier idea which had to be overthrown by it - and how it is still not so long ago that a masculine woman could dare, with unrestrained presumption, to recommend the Germans to the sympathy of Europe as gentle, good-hearted, weak-willed, poetical idiots.¹⁰ Finally we should understand with sufficient profundity Napoleon's surprise when he came to visit Goethe: that reveals what people had thought about the "German spirit" for centuries. "Voilá un homme!" [There's a man!] - which is, in effect, saying: That is really a man! And I had expected only a German!-