THE PENDULUM of dynamic subjectivism swings from a faithful, dreamy, or thoughtful absorption in the world to an aggressive, defiant protest against the world. German history proves it abundantly from the days of the Cimbers and Teutons to the days of the Reformation and up to our present age. Or is it a mere accident that German thinkers formulated that man is obsessed by the will to the infinite, or, as Nietzsche put it: “that man could not tolerate God to be unless he be himself God?” We may well ask if Luther was not expressing a German truth by his word that the soul finds his way to his door by swaying to and fro. Is it a mere accident that dialectic philosophy and dialectic theology were made in Germany and actually acquired reputation only there? Is it not a characteristic self-analysis to assert with Hegel that religion and thought develop in permanent self-contradictions and antagonism and move by such antagonisms to ever higher and higher forms? Is it not a distinctly German appreciation and interpretation of history to say that it is nothing but a sequence of wars? The German mind evidences a clear imperialism interrupted by periods of a self-forgotten devotion to the world, but even in the imperialistic phases there remains some of this self-forgotten devotion—just as in the selfforgotten devotion there surges some of this imperialism. A wellbalanced equilibrium obviously is very hard to attain; it does not even lie in the intention of the German mind because it would entail the recognition of and submission to an ontological order, to form and law.