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CONSOLATORY THOUGHTS ON THE EARTHLY LIFE AND A FUTURE EXISTENCE (1890)⁴⁷

TRANSLATED BY MARY HERMS

PREFACE

The last noteworthy use to which the aged Fieldmarshal put his pen was to commit to paper certain reflections and chains of reasoning, for which he drew upon the rich experience of his strenuous and eventful life, and in which he hoped to find consolation in his last days, and a vantage ground from which he might cast a glance over the unknown future and confirm his faith in an everlasting life.

The aim of the Fieldmarshal, in writing these pages, was to attain to clearness of vision concerning his earthly lot, to bring the forces which were at work in his soul into harmony with those which govern the universe, to reconcile faith and knowledge, and to satisfy himself that life on this earth can only be regarded as a preparation for eternal life, and must be regulated accordingly. So lofty is this aim that it alone entitles these confessions to a serious and respectful consideration. But how much must our admiration and our sense of the value of this work be increased when we perceive with what earnestness of effort, and with what depth of feeling, the Fieldmarshal had revolved these thoughts in his mind till he brought them to maturity. And more than that. It was his wish to bequeath these consolatory thoughts to his family, as a sincere confession of his private convictions. This is the light in which he wished posterity to regard this manuscript, which he wrote out in the last year of his life, in wonderfully firm characters, which attest the worth of the matter contained in it.

He wrote down these thoughts at Creisau, and left the copy on his desk. Whenever he visited his country-seat he revised and corrected what he had written. No less than four drafts of the introduction to this work have been preserved.

The succession of thoughts is the same in all four versions, but on the one hand renewed and deepened meditations enabled him to express his ideas with greater force and precision, and on the other sometimes developed them further, so as to present them more exhaustively and convincingly.

These pages contain the last efforts of a noble life. In them Moltke appears as he was when we knew him and took him for our pattern, reconciled with the anomalies and the contradictions of life, with a pious grasp of principles which he had thought out for himself, and in the assurance of which he found peace. We learn here how it was possible for him to rise superior to the world, and preserve a contented mind in all the vicissitudes of life.

DR. TORCHE-MITTLER

Man feels that he is a complete being, different from other creatures, and outwardly distinguished from them by his body, which here on earth is the habitation of the soul.

Yet in this complete whole I believe I can distinguish different functions, which, though closely connected with the soul, and ruled by it, have an independent existence.

In the mysterious beginnings of life physical development takes the first place. Nature is busily at work in the child's body as it grows, and is already preparing it to be the dwelling-place of higher functions. The body reaches the acme of its perfection before its career is half over, and out of the surplus of its energy calls new life into being. Thenceforward its lot is decay and painful struggling to preserve its own existence.

During something like a third of our existence, that is, while we are asleep, the body receives no commands from its ruler, and yet the heart beats without interruption, the tissues are wasted and repaired, and the process of respiration is continued, all independently of our will.

The servant may even rebel against the master, as when our muscles are painfully contracted by cramp. But pain is the summons for help which is sent by the living organism when it has lost control over the dead matter, which loss we feel as the illness of our vassal.

On the whole we must regard our body as a real part of our being, which is still, in a sense, external to our inmost selves.

Is, then, the soul at least the true ego, a single and indivisible whole?

The intellect advances, by slow development, to greater and greater perfection till old age is reached, if the body does not leave it in the lurch. The critical faculty grows as experience accumulates, but memory, reason's handmaid, disappears at an earlier stage, or at least loses the power of receiving new impressions. Wonderful enough is this faculty which enables us to store up all the valuable lessons and experiences of earliest youth in a thousand drawers, which open in a moment in answer to the requirements of the mind.

It is not to be disputed that the old often appear dull-witted, but I cannot believe in a real darkening of the reason, which is a bright spark of the Divine, and even in madness the negation of reason is only external and apparent. A deaf man playing on an instrument out of tune may strike the right notes, and be inwardly persuaded that his execution is faultless, while all around him hear nothing but the wildest discords.

The sovereignty of reason is absolute; she recognizes no superior authority. No power, not even that of our own wills, can compel her to regard as false what she has already recognized as true.

E pur si muove!

Thought ranges through the infinite realms of starry space, and fathoms the inscrutable depths of the minutest life, finding nowhere any limit, but everywhere law, which is the immediate expression of the divine thought.

The stone falls on Sirius by the same law of gravitation as on the earth; the distances of the planets, the combinations of chemical elements are based on arithmetical ratios, and everywhere the same causes produce the same effects. Nowhere in nature is there anything arbitrary, but everywhere law. True, reason cannot comprehend the origin of things, but neither is she anywhere in conflict with the laws that govern all things. Reason and the universe are in harmony; they must therefore have the same origin.

Even when, through the imperfection of all created things, reason enters on paths which lead to error, truth is still the one object of her search.

Reason may thus be brought into conflict with many an honored tradition. She rejects miracle, "faith's dearest child," and refuses to admit that Omnipotence can ever find it necessary for the attainment of its purposes to suspend, in isolated cases, the operation of those laws by which the universe is eternally governed. But these doubts are not directed against religion, but against the form in which religion is presented to us.

Christianity has raised the world from barbarism to civilization. Its influence has, in the course of centuries, abolished slavery, ennobled work, emancipated women, and revealed eternity. But was it dogma that brought these blessings? It is possible to avoid misunderstandings with regard to all subjects except those which transcend human conception, and these are the very subjects over which men have fought and desolated the world for the last eighteen hundred years, from the extermination of the Arians, on through the Thirty Years' War, to the scaffold of the Inquisition, and what is the result of all this fighting? The same differences of opinion as ever.

We may accept the doctrines of religion, as we accept the assurance of a trusty friend, without examination, but the kernel of all religions is the morality they teach, of which the Christian is the purest and most far-reaching.

And yet men speak slightingly of a barren morality, and place the form in which religion is presented before everything else. I fear it is the pulpit zealot, who tries to persuade where he cannot convince, that empties the church with his sermons.

After all, why should not every pious prayer, whether addressed to Buddha, to Allah, or to Jehovah, be heard by the same God, beside whom there is none other? Does not the mother hear her child's petition in whatever language it lisps her name?

Reason is nowhere in conflict with morality, for the good is always finally identical with the rational; but whether our actions shall or shall not correspond with the good, reason cannot decide. Here the ruling part of the soul is supreme, the soul which feels, acts, and wills. To her alone, not to her two vassals, has God entrusted the two-edged sword of freewill, that gift which, as Scripture tells us, may be our salvation or our perdition.

But, more than this, a trusty councillor has been assigned us, who is independent of our wills, and bears credentials from God Himself. Conscience is an incorruptible and infallible judge, whom, if we will, we may hear pronounce sentence every moment, and whose voice at last reaches even those who most obstinately refuse to listen.

The laws which human society has imposed upon itself can take account of actions only in their tribunals, and not of thoughts and feelings. Even the various religions make different demands among the different peoples. Here they require the Sunday to be kept holy, here the Saturday or Friday. One allows pleasures which another forbids. Even apart from these differences there is always a wide neutral ground between what is allowed and what is forbidden; and it is here that conscience, with her subtler discrimination, raises her voice. She tells us that every day should be kept sacred to the Lord, that even permitted interest becomes unjust when exacted from the needy; in a word, she preaches morality in the bosom of Christian and Jew, of heathen and savage. For even among uncivilized races which have not the light of Christianity there is an agreement as to the fundamental conceptions of good and evil. They, too, recognize the breaking of promises, lying, treachery, and ingratitude as evil; they, too, hold as sacred the bond between parents, children, and kinsmen. It is hard to believe in the universal corruption of mankind, for, however obscured by savagery and superstition, there lies dormant in every human breast that feeling for the noble and the beautiful which is the seed of virtue, and a conscience which points out the right path. Can there be a more convincing proof of God's existence than this universal sense of right and wrong, this unanimous recognition of one law, alike in the physical and in the moral world, except that nature obeys this law with a full and absolute obedience, while man, who is free, has the power of violating it?

The body and the reason serve the ruling part of the soul, but they put forward claims of their own, they have their own share of power, and thus man's life is a perpetual conflict with self. If in this conflict the soul, hard-pressed from within and without, does not always end by obeying the voice of conscience, let us hope that He who created us imperfect will not require perfection from us.

For consider to what violent storms man is exposed in the voyage of life, what variety there is in his natural endowments, what incongruity between education and position in life. It is easy for the favorite of fortune to keep in the right path; temptation, at any rate to crime, hardly reaches him; how hard, on the other hand, is it for the hungry, the uneducated, the passionate man to refrain from evil. To all this due weight will be given in the last judgment, when guilt and innocence are put in the balance, and thus mercy will become justice, two conceptions which generally exclude one another.

It is harder to think of nothing than of something; when the something is once given, harder to imagine cessation than continuance. This earthly life cannot possibly be an end in itself. We did not ask for it; it was given to us, imposed upon us. We must be destined to something higher than a perpetual repetition of the sad experiences of this life. Shall those enigmas which surround us on all sides, and for a solution of which the best of mankind have sought their whole life long, never be made plain? What purpose is served by the thousand ties of love and friendship which bind past and present together, if there is no future, if death ends all?

But what can we take with us into the future?

The functions of our earthly garment, the body, have ceased; the matter composing it, which even during life was ever being changed, has entered into new chemical combinations, and the earth enters into possession of all that is her due. Not an atom is lost. Scripture promises us the resurrection of a glorified body, and indeed a separate existence without limitation in space is unthinkable; yet it may be that this promise implies nothing more than the continued existence of the individual, as opposed to pantheism.

We may be allowed to hope that our reason, and with it all the knowledge that we have painfully acquired, will pass with us into eternity; perhaps, too, the remembrance of our earthly life. Whether that is really to be wished is another question. How if our whole life all our thoughts and actions should some day be spread out before us and we became our own judges, incorruptible and pitiless?

But, above all, the emotions must be retained by the soul, if it is to be immortal. Friendship does indeed rest on reciprocity, and is partly an affair of the reason; but love can exist though unreturned. Love is the purest, the most divine spark of our being.

Scripture bids us before all things love God, an invisible, incomprehensible Being, who sends us joy and happiness, but also privation and pain. How else can we love Him than by obeying His commandments, and loving our fellow-men, whom we see and understand?

When, as the Apostle Paul writes, faith is lost in knowledge, and hope in sight, and only love remains, then we hope, not without reason, to be assured of the love of our merciful Judge. COUNT MOLTKE.

Creisau, October, 1890.

* * * * *

Ferdinand Lassalle

THE LIFE AND WORK OF FERDINAND LASSALLE

By ARTHUR N. HOLCOMBE, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Government, Harvard University

Ferdinand Lassalle was born on April 11, 1825, at Breslau, of Jewish parents. The father, Hyman Lassal, was a prosperous business man, ambitious for his son, able to give him the best education the times afforded, and willing to let him choose his own career. The life of the Lassal family seems to have been like that of any well-to-do Jewish family in the kingdom of Prussia during the early nineteenth century. Of a quiet and peaceable behavior, they were devoted mainly to money-making and their domestic affairs.

The young Lassalle gave early indications of his unusual character. While still a boy in the local grammar school, his proud and independent disposition won him the displeasure of his teachers. Especially the oppression of his own race filled his soul with wrath. "O could I only give myself up to my boyish day-dreams," he wrote in his note-book at this time, "how I would put myself at the head of the Jews, weapons in hand, and make them independent!" Eventually he abandoned in disgust the attempt to gain a classical education in the schools of his native city and entered the commercial high school in Leipzig. Here again his fiery temperament could not brook the restraints imposed upon him and he presently returned to his father's house.

The problem of a career was not easy to solve. The father's success enabled the son to choose his course in life without regard to financial considerations. Business and mere money-making were in fact distasteful to him.

The learned professions were more to his liking. The father recommended medicine or the law, but the son aspired to some less hackneyed career. Jews were not then admitted to the service of the state in Prussia and the absence of popular institutions of government rendered an independent political career for the time being out of the question. The son chose, therefore, to make his mark as a man of learning. He would be a great philosopher or scientist. Doubtless he kept in mind the possibility of engaging in journalism, should the times change, and becoming a tribune of the people. Such bold ideas are the birthright of all boys of spirit.

Ferdinand Lassale finished his education with his destiny consciously before him. He studied philology and philosophy at the universities of Breslau and Berlin and in the winter of 1845-46 made his first visit to Paris as a traveling scholar. Here he first adorned his family name with the final le, and here, also, he met the chief of the heroes of his youth, Heinrich Heine. Heine has given us a vivid pen-picture of Lassalle, as he saw him in those student days. "My friend, Mr. Lassalle … is a most highly gifted young man, uniting the widest knowledge with the greatest astuteness. I have been astounded at his energy of will, vigor of intellect, and promptness of action…. Lassalle is a true child of modern times, wishing to know nothing of the humility and renunciation which have characterized our own lives. This new race means to enjoy, to assert itself…. We were, however, perhaps happier in our idealism than these stern gladiators who go forth so proudly to mortal combats."

Returning to Berlin in the spring of 1846, Lassalle signalized the attainment of his majority by espousing the cause of the Countess von Hatzfeld, then in the midst of her suits for divorce and for an accounting of her property. It was a characteristic act. The Countess' troubles arose through no fault of his. He had little to gain by engaging in the affair and much to lose—not only time and money, but friends, reputation, and his very career. Yet he plunged into the thick of the fray and made the cause of the unhappy lady his own. For eight long years he fought her enemies from law-court to law-court, through thirty-six of them in all, to final victory. From it all he gained a good working knowledge of the law, a splendid training in forensic address, and a taste of the joys of combat against bitter odds. These things were later to stand him in good stead. But he had touched smut and was himself besmirched.

Meanwhile the famous year, 1848, had come and gone. Men like Lassalle are made for just such years. His friends all played their parts, each in his own way, in the struggle for German liberty and union. Lassalle alone was absent from the field. He was defending himself against a charge of criminal conspiracy to commit larceny, an incident in the case of the Countess von Hatzfeld. He disposed of this charge in season to join the editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and in the spring of 1849 he completed his apprenticeship as a revolutionist with a term in jail. At the expiration of his sentence he returned to the cause of the Countess, but he was required by the Prussian government to keep away from Berlin. Not until 1857, through the intervention of A. von Humboldt, did he receive permission to resume his residence in the capital. Then, with his friend, the Countess, he settled down once more to the realization of his youthful dreams, and the long-deferred career was taken up in earnest.

Lassalle's career as a scholar and man of learning was short, but productive. It was opened in 1857 with the publication of his work, the Philosophy of Heraclitus, projected more than ten years before, and it was concluded in 1861, as the event proved, by the publication of his System of the Acquired Rights. Midway between the two appeared a dramatic composition, Franz von Sickingen, which served both as an intellectual diversion from the more serious studies in philosophy and law and as a personal confession of faith on the part of the author. None of these works can be pronounced an unqualified success. The philosophy of Heraclitus was too obscure to exert any great influence upon contemporary thought, even when expounded by a Lassalle, and the philosophy of Lassalle himself was too closely modeled upon that of his master, Hegel, to obtain much notice on its own account. The treatise on the acquired rights of man was too technical to attract popular attention and too unorthodox to receive the general approval of professional students of the law. The Franz von Sickingen was too deficient in dramatic action to be presented on the stage and too artificial in literary form to be read in the library. The three productions secured for Lassalle a position among scholars but brought him no general recognition.

The three productions, however, pour a flood of light upon Lassalle's own powerful personality. In the Philosophy of Heraclitus he grappled with the most formidable philosophical problems and showed himself a master of the Hegelian dialectic. In the System of the Acquired Rights he attacked the very foundations of the current theories of law and justice with the same concentration of energy and purpose as had been displayed in the more practical problems of law and justice involved in the case of the Countess von Hatzfeld. But it is in Franz von Sickingen that Lassalle expressed his own nature most clearly and most completely. Here indeed he speaks directly for himself through the lips of Ulrich von Hutten. Passage after passage springs from the soul of the living Lassalle, the same Lassalle that in his boyhood dreams would emancipate the Jews by force of arms, that in his early manhood so deeply impressed Heine, and that so shortly afterwards was ready to defy all the powers of the kingdom in defence of a friendless woman. The following speech of the legendary von Hutten is characteristic of the real Lassalle:

 
"O worthy Sir! Think better of the sword!
A sword, when swung in freedom's sacred cause,
Becomes the Holy Word, of which you preach,
The God, incarnate in reality.
* * * * *
And all great things, which e'er will come to pass
Will owe their final being to the sword."
 

In short, Lassalle was not by nature a man of the study. He was a man of the battlefield.

The hour for battle was fast approaching. In 1859 the alliance of Napoleon the Third and Cavour against the Austrians was consummated and the war for the liberation and unification of Italy began. The hopes of all true Germans for the unification of the Fatherland took new life. Especially the survivors of '48 felt their pulses quicken. In 1859 Lassalle revealed his own interest in contemporary politics by the publication of his pamphlet on The Italian War and the Duty of Prussia, and in the following year by his address on Fichte's Political Legacy and Our Own Times. He also planned to establish a popular newspaper in Berlin, but the scheme was abandoned in 1861, on account of the refusal of the Prussian government to sanction the naturalization of the man whom Lassalle desired for his associate in the enterprise, Karl Marx. With the Prince of Prussia's accession to the throne and the brilliant successes of the Progressive party in the Prussian elections, men instinctively felt that the times were big with portentous events.

Lassalle's political ideas were already well developed. He was born a democrat. In early nineteenth-century England the young Disraeli could hopefully plan a different course, but Lassalle in Prussia could look for no public career as an aristocrat. Under the circumstances to be a democrat meant also to be a republican, and, if need be, a revolutionist. As a youth he drank deep from the idealistic springs that inspired the republican party throughout Germany. He admired Schiller and Fichte and, above all, Heine and Börne. Lassalle indeed had drunk deeper than most of the revolutionists of '48. He was not only a democrat and a republican; he was also a socialist. Even before his first visit to Paris he had become acquainted with the writings of St. Simon, Fourier, and the utopian socialists in general. His mind was ripe for the doctrines of the Communist Manifesto, when that epoch-making document appeared, but he does not seem to have become personally acquainted with Marx until his connection with the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in the fall of 1848. From that time on till the foundation of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein Lassalle stood closer to Marx than to any other one man.

Lassalle's opportunity to turn definitely from scholarship to politics came in 1862 with the outbreak of the struggle over the Prussian constitution. In a series of vigorous addresses (April, 1862, to February, 1863) he first criticised, then condemned, the Progressive party for its—as it seemed to him—pusillanimous policy. But Lassalle was not content merely to criticise and condemn. His restless energy found no adequate expression short of the creation of a new party of his own. His repudiation of the Progressives, however, was not dictated by differences over tactics alone. He rejected the fundamental principles of the liberal movement in German politics. He saw around him the evidences of deep and widespread poverty. The great problem of the day to his mind was not the political problem of a proper constitution of government, but the social problem of a proper distribution of wealth. The need, as he saw it, was not for parchment-guarantees of individual liberty. It was for practical promotion of social welfare. Hence, at the same time that he opened fire upon the tactics of the Progressives, he unfolded his plans for the constructive treatment of the social, as distinct from the political, problem.

The nature of Lassalle's social ideal and the character of the means by which he sought to justify it are for the first time systematically set forth in his address (April 12, 1862) "upon the special connection between modern times and the idea of a laboring class," subsequently published under the title, The Workingmen's Programme. This address was the point of departure for the socialist movement in Germany, as the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels was that of international socialism. It was indeed largely inspired by the spirit of that revolutionary document. During the two and a half years which followed the publication of this address, Lassalle often set forth his fundamental social philosophy with extraordinary clearness and force, but he never surpassed his opening salutation to the workingmen of Germany. It has been read by hundreds of thousands. It was his masterpiece.

The Workingmen's Programme attracted the immediate attention of the Prussian government. The police took offence at the tone of the address and brought against its author a charge of criminal incitement of the poor to hatred and contempt of the rich. On January 16, 1863, Lassalle appeared in court and defended himself against this charge in an almost equally celebrated address, published under the title, Science and the Workingmen. Here Lassalle speaks in a different but no less brilliant vein. From that time forth Lassalle's appearances before audiences of workingmen quite generally led to corresponding appearances before audiences of judges. If one court set him free, he was liable to be haled before another court for defamation of the prosecuting attorney in the court of first resort. But the prisoner's dock served as well as the orator's platform for the purposes of his agitation.

The Workingmen's Programme attracted less immediate attention from the workingmen themselves. But among the few whose attention was attracted was a group of Leipzig labor leaders who invited Lassalle to advise them more fully concerning his plans for the formation of an independent labor party. Lassalle's reply to this invitation was the Open Letter to the Committee for the Calling of a General Convention of German Workingmen at Leipzig, dated March 1, 1863. This letter sets forth the platform upon which Lassalle proposed to make his appeal for the support of the working classes. The two main planks of the platform were the demands for manhood suffrage and for the establishment of coöperative factories and workshops with the aid of subventions from the State. Through manhood suffrage Lassalle expected that the working classes would immediately become the dominant power in the State, and through State-aided producers' associations he expected that the coöperative commonwealth would eventually come into being. Manhood suffrage was thus the fundamental political condition of Social Democracy. State-aided producers' associations were but a temporary economic expedient. Upon this basis, May 23, 1863, the General Association of German Workingmen (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein) was founded.

The immediate results of the foundation of the General Association of German Workingmen were much less than Lassalle had anticipated. He had hoped that it would quickly surpass the Liberal National Association, founded by the leaders of the Progressive party in 1859, which at this time counted about 25,000 members. In fact, during Lassalle's life the Workingmen's Association never reached one-fifth of that number. The workingmen generally were slow to recognize either the character of Lassalle's purposes or the character of the man himself. Despite the power and brilliancy of the speech-making campaign upon which Lassalle promptly entered he made little headway. The progress of the movement among the rank and file, however, was more satisfactory than in any other quarter. Marx had been lost to the movement before it was inaugurated and the rigid Marxians among the German socialists continued to hold aloof. Lassalle's close personal friend, Lothar Bucher, could see no prospect of early success and withdrew while there was still time. The independent socialist, Rodbertus, to whom Lassalle next turned for assistance, had little faith in manhood suffrage and none at all in State-aided producers' associations. To confirm his unbelief in manhood suffrage he pointed to the ease with which a popular plebiscite could be manipulated by a Louis Napoleon. State-aided producers' associations, he declared to be incompatible with scientific socialism, a dangerous compromise between the national workshops advocated by the utopian socialist, Louis Blanc, and the coöperative corporations, advocated by the anarchist, Prudhomme. So Lassalle found himself alone at the head of his new independent labor party.