Really I must turn over a new leaf with my reading. I feel with pain, that I still have such an astonishing amount to learn; that I must sow In order to reap.... History is becoming dearer to me every day. I have this week read a history of the Thirty Years' War, and my head is still quite feverish from it. That this epoch of the greatest national misery should have been at the same time the most brilliant epoch of human power! What a number of great men came forth from this night! I could wish that for the ten years past I had done nothing but study history. I believe I should have become a very different fellow. Do you think I shall yet be able to make up for lost time?
One sees from this language by what particular hook the study of history had taken hold of Schiller's mind, and what kind of profit he was promising himself from further reading. He was interested in the evolution of great men. For him, as for the poets always, from Homer down, history resolved itself into the doings of the leaders.
For the time being, however, the new zeal seems to have been a mere flash in the pan, that set nothing in motion. Nor was Körner able, for some time to come, to induce his friend to make a serious study of Kant's 'Critique', though every third word between them was of philosophy. Nevertheless their philosophic debates did bear literary fruit. The third number of the _Thalia_, which came out in May, contained the first installment of the 'Philosophical Letters', a fictitious correspondence between two friends, Julius and Raphael, who have arrived by different routes at the same way of thinking, and are resolved to tell the world how it all came about. Julius is Schiller; Raphael is Körner, who actually contributed one of the later letters. We learn that Julius was passing through a spiritual crisis. He was happy but he had not reflected. The little world of his rapturous emotions sufficed him. Now, however, Raphael has enlightened his mind, made him a citizen of the world and taught him to comprehend the all-sufficient majesty of reason; but he has won enlightenment at the expense of peace. He is miserable and demands back his soul. Raphael rebukes him gently for his faint-heartedness and asks for a history of his thinking. So Julius rummages through his papers and sends on a somewhat elaborate 'Theosophy of Julius',--a sort of _précis_, it would seem, of Schiller's earlier views. It is religious mysticism set forth with warm eloquence. The universe is a thought of God. The highest aim of thinking is to read the divine plan. All spirits are attracted by perfection. The supreme perfection is God, of whom love is an emanation. Love is gain; hate is loss; pardon, the recovery of lost property; misanthropy a prolonged suicide; egoism the utmost poverty. If every man loved all mankind, every man would possess the world. If we comprehend perfection it becomes ours. If we plant beauty and joy, beauty and joy shall we reap. If we think clearly we shall love fervently.