From Infancy To Manhood

Johann Gottfried Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit), tr. T. Churchill, 1800, bk. VIII., ch. 2, last para.:

Great Spirit of the world, with what eyes dost thou contemplate all the shadowy forms and visions that course each other on this our globe! For we are shadows, and dreams of shadows are all that our fancies imagine. As little as we are capable of respiring pure air, as little can pure reason impart itself wholly at present to our compound clay-formed shell. Yet, amid all the errors of the imagination, the human species is molding to it; men are attached to figures because they express things, and thus through the thickest clouds they seek and perceive rays of truth. Happy the chosen few who proceed, as far as is possible in our limited sphere, from fancies to essences, that is, from infancy to manhood, and whose clear understandings go through the history of their brethren with this end in view. The mind nobly expands when it is able to emerge from the narrow circle which climate and education have drawn around it, and learns from other nations at least what may be dispensed with by man. How much that we have been accustomed to consider as absolutely necessary do we find others live without, and consequently perceive to be by no means indispensable! Numberless ideas, which we have often admitted as the most general principles of the human understanding, disappear in this place and that with the climate, as the land vanishes like a mist from the eye of the navigator. What one nation holds indispensable to the circle of its thoughts has never entered into the mind of a second, and by a third has been deemed injurious. Thus we wander over the earth in a labyrinth of human fancies; but the question is: where is the central point of the labyrinth to which all our wanderings may be traced, as refracted rays to the Sun?