Are the conditions heaved away, which sanction Superfluity to feed upon the marrow of Necessity: then of themselves arise the conditions which call the necessary, the true, the imperishable, to life. Are the conditions heaved away, which permit the continuance of the need of Luxury: then of themselves are given the conditions which allow the stilling of the necessary need of man in the teeming overflow of Nature and of his own productive human faculties, in unimaginably rich but ever fitting measure. And yet once more,-are the conditions of the tyranny of Fashion heaved away: then of themselves are the- conditions of True Art at hand; and with one waive of the enchanter's wand, will holy, glorious Art, the daughter of the noblest Manhood, blossom in like fulness and perfection with Mother Nature, the conditions of whose now completed harmony of form have issued from the birth-pangs of the elements. Like to this blissful harmony of Nature, will she endure and ever show her fruitfulness, as the purest and most perfect satisfaction of the truest, noblest need of perfected mankind; i.e. of men who are all that which of their essence they can be, and therefore should and shall be.
5. THE ART-ANTAGONISTIC SHAPE OF PRESENT LIFE, UNDER THE SWAY OF ABSTRACT THOUGHT AND FASHION.
The first beginning and foundation of all that exists and all that is conceivable, is actual physical being. The inner recognition of his life-need as the common life-need of his Species, in contradistinction to Nature and all her countless living species that lie apart from Man,-is the beginning and foundation of man's Thinking. Thought is therefore the faculty possessed by Man, not merely to sense the actual and physical from its external aspect, but to distinguish all its parts according to their essence, and finally to grasp and picture to himself their intimate connection. The idea ("Begriff") of a thing is the image formed in Thought of its actual substance; the portrayal of the images of all discernible substances in one joint-image, in which the faculty of Thought presents to itself the picture of the essence of all realities in their connected sequence, is the work of the highest energy of the human soul,-the Spirit ("Geist"). If in this joint-image man must necessarily have included the image, the idea, of his own being also,- nay, if this his own prefigured being must be, before all else, the artistic force that pictures forth the whole conceptual art-work : then does this force, with all its joint portrayal of each reality, proceed alone from the real, physical man; and thus, at bottom, from his life-need, and finally from that which summoned forth this life-need, the physical reality of Nature. But where Thought casts aside this linking cable; where, after doubled and again redoubled presentment of itself, it fain would look upon itself as its original cause; where Mind ("Geist") instead of as the last and most conditioned, would conceive itself as the first and least conditioned energy ("Thätigkeit"), and therefore as the ground and cause of Nature,-there also is the fly-wheel of Necessity upheaved, and blind Caprice runs headlong- free, -boundless, and unfettered, as our metaphysicians fancy-through the workshops of the brain, and hurls herself; a raging stream of madness, upon the world of actuality.
If Mind has manufactured Nature, if Thought has made the Actual, if the Philosopher comes before the Man: then Nature, Actuality and Man are no more necessary, and their existence is not only superfluous but even harmful; for the greatest superfluity of all is the lagging of the Incomplete when once the Complete has come to being. In this wise Nature, Actuality and Man would only then have any meaning, or any pretext for their presence, when Mind- the unconditioned Spirit, the only cause and reason, and thus the only law unto itself-employed them for its absolute and sovereign pleasure. If Mind is in itself Necessity, then Life is mere caprice, a fantastic masquerade, an idle pastime, a frivolous whim, a "car tel est notre plaisir" of the mind; then is all purely human virtue, and Love before all else, a thing to be approved or disallowed according to occasion; then is all purely human Need a luxury, and Luxury the only current need; then is the wealth of Nature a thing to be dispensed with, and the parasitic growth of Culture the only indispensable; then is the happiness of man a secondary matter, and the abstract State the main consideration; the Folk the accidental stuff, and the prince and savant the necessary consumers of this stuff.
If we take the end for the beginning, the assuagement for the need, satiety for hunger; then is all movement, all advance, not even conceivable except in line with a concocted need, a hunger brought about by stimulation; and this, in very truth, is the lifespring of our whole Culture of to-day, and its utterance is-Fashion.
Fashion is the artificial stimulus that rouses an unnatural' need where the natural is not to hand; but whatsoever does not originate in a real need, is arbitrary, uncalled-for, and tyrannical. Fashion is therefore the maddest, most unheard-of tyranny that has ever issued from man's perversity; it demands from Nature an absolute obedience; it dictates to real need a thorough self-disownment in favour of an artificial; it compels man's natural sense of beauty to worship at the shrine of what is hateful; it kills his health, to bring him to delight in sickness; it breaks his strength and all his force, to let him find content in weakness. Where the absurdest Fashion reigns, there must Nature be regarded as the height of absurdity; where the most criminal un-Nature reigns, there must the utterance of Nature appear the fellest crime; where craziness usurps the place of truth, there must Truth herself be prisoned under lock and bar, as crazy.
The soul of Fashion is the most absolute uniformity, and its god an egoistic, sexless, barren god. Its motive force is therefore arbitrary alteration, unnecessary change, confused and restless striving after the opposite of its essential uniformity. Its might is the might of habit. But Habit is the invincible despot that rules all weaklings, cowards, and those bereft of veritable need. Habit is the communism of egoism, the tough, unyielding swathe of mutual, free-from-want self-interest; its artificial life-pulse is even that of Fashion.
Fashion is therefore no artistic begetting from herself, but a mere artificial deriving from her opposite, Nature; from whom alone she must at bottom draw her nourishment, just as the luxury of the upper classes feeds only on the straining of the lower, labouring classes towards assuagement of their natural life-needs. The caprice of Fashion, therefore, can only draw upon the stores of actual Nature; all her reshapings, flourishes, and gewgaws have at the last their archetype in Nature. Like all our abstract thinking, in its farthest aberrations, she finally can think out and invent naught else than what already is at hand in Nature and in Man, in substance and in form. But her procedure is an arrogant one, capriciously cut loose from Nature; she orders and commands, where everything in truth is bound to hearken and obey. Thus with all her figurings she can but disfigure Nature, and not portray her; she can but derive, and not invent; for invention, in effect, is naught but finding out, the finding and discerning of Nature.
Fashion's invention is therefore mechanical. But the mechanical is herein distinguished from the artistic: that it fares from derivative to derivative, from means to means, to finally bring forth but one more mean, the Machine. Whereas the artistic strikes the very opposite path: throws means on means behind it, pierces through derivative after derivative, to arrive at last at the source of every derivation, of every mean, in Nature's self, and there to slake its need in understanding.
Thus the Machine is the cold and heartless ally of luxury-craving men. Through the machine have they at last made even human reason their liege subject; for, led astray from Art's discovery, dishonoured and disowned, it consumes itself at last in mechanical refinements, in absorption into the Machine, instead of in absorption into Nature in the Art-work.