HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

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xlx
Modem times find themselves with
an immense system of institutions, established
facts, accredited dogmas, customs,
rules, which have come to them
from times not modern. In this system
their life has to be carried forward ; yet
they have a sense that this system is
not of their own creation, that it by no
means corresponds exactly with the
wants of their actual life, that, for them
it is customary, not rational. The
awakening of this sense is the awakening
of the modern spirit. The modern
spirit is now awake almost everywhere;
the sense of want of correspondence between
the forms of modern Europe and
its spirit, between the new wine of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and
the old bottles of the eleventh and
twelfth centuries, or even of the sixteenth
and seventeenth, almost every
one now perceives; it is no longer dangerous
to affirm that this want of correspondence
exists; people are even
beginning to be shy of denying it. To
remove this want of correspondence is
begmning to be the settled endeavor of
most persons of good sense. Dissolvents
of the old European system of
dominant ideas and facts we must all
be, all of us who have any power of
working; what we have to study is that
we may not be acrid dissolvents of it.
And how did Goethe, that grand dissolvent
in an age when there were fewer
ot them that at present, proceed in his